


Amaranthine

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Marauders' Era, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-29
Updated: 2008-08-21
Packaged: 2019-01-19 11:09:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 36,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12409197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: As soon as Lily entered my life, first from a distance then breath upon breath, I tumbled silently from Olympus where I was warm and godly and golden to a place of utter and un-surrendering humanity. Not only that but the most tender and throbbing humanity there was: love.





	1. Infatuation

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

                                                                              ** C _hapter One:_ Infatuation**                    

            It was the spring of 1975 when I first became infatuated with Lily Evans. Her spiraled red hair was untraceable, in the same way that she herself was. I could never follow her, and most of the time her memory was based purely on essence, on dreams. Her features lay thick in my mind, the pallid skin draped with a thin sheet of freckles, thin torrid legs that were always bare, and her listless eyes illuminated like embers, out of boredom rather than thought. 

            It came as an unspoken agreement, a pact that we never quite agreed on. She dominated my thoughts, the sound of bells murmuring her name. When she was gone, I dreamt of her, when she was present I absorbed her every move, drank in her words like wine. In the mornings when she would stumble into the common room with dark bags hung below her eyelids, baggy clothing radiating her thinness I sat in the puffed leather chair, reading the same book day after day, watching her, hoping to catch a glimpse that meant something, that would help me dissolve her mystery. 

            She did things, all things, in a manner that I couldn’t even comprehend. Each movement laced with glamour, dripping with an unseen elegance that I could never trace back to anywhere but the sky. Watching her eat was intoxicating, my thoughts became instantly stagnant. She held the spoon between her thumb and her forefinger and pushed the small bites of food into her mouth, coaxing them inside her. She cut meat ravenously, the knife biting down to the plate with fervor. Everything about her sent me into a trance, left me flailing only in my own imagination, a bottomless trough of days that had never happened, and things I never really knew.  

            My days were commandeered by hallucinations of kissing her, of watching her lift her skirt. My hormones were rampant of images of her, seemingly not erotic, but that sent me into a tizzy. Lily sitting at her desk, her skirt bunched up, plain view of her thigh. Lily bending forward to grab a book, a quick flash of her pearly bra. Lily flirting with the cooks, her ankles twisted together, her back arched. My unrequited love ached, and grew wider as the days past, much like a tumor. 

            I can remember a day, all of us sitting in our room. I lay on my unkempt sheets looking up at the ceiling, watching the cracks bend into images of lawnmowers, and female lips. The room smelled bitterly of pot, clouds of smoke coiling in between our beds. The Beatles oozed from the radio. 

_All the lonely people, where do they all belong? All the lonely people, where do they all come from?_

            The sorrow in those words reached me, and a hazy vision of Lily toppled my thoughts. It was all so clear now, her blinding woe, her emptiness. All this time she had been calling for me, screaming to be saved from her lackluster life of glamour and charisma. She was miserable, and I could save her. 

            That was how it began, as a quest that sprung from infatuation, as something that quickly deepened into obsession, which lead me to a prime fixation on a girl I had never known. My love bending between orbital’s up in space, swirling amongst harmony and God’s fingers, untouched by reality, something as fine and malleable as tears. In my dreams she loved me back, and knew the curves of my ankle, knew every molecule of lust dividing my blood, and how all of it could belong to her, how most days it already did. 

            I watched her play in the snow, drops of ice clinging to her hair the way I clung to her, to the Lily that existed purely in my mind's eye. She walked the halls as if they were a runway, and I watched her, saw everything she wanted me to, understood how much she needed me, and how much, in return, I ached for her. Our relationship, much like my love, was intangible, hollow to the naked eye for it was something that existed on a level far deeper than one could see, miles beneath the earth’s crust. Our love resided in the world of possibility; a place more pure and more immaculate than fallen angels, more devastating than wishes left unanswered. 

            So I spent my time trying to find her, to understand the woven tentacles of her broad womanhood, of her petty existence and the meaning behind those mossy, lethargic eyes that I ingested during class, and memorized at night. I grew up behind the screen of my delusion, and watched my self wither into a walking, beating, throbbing item for her to grasp, for her to finally see. I let myself be as transparent as water hoping that one day she would seize the opportunity that I had so meticulously crafted for her, that maybe one day far off in the future she would notice me looking, and for the first time I would see her look back.

            I laughed at jokes that she never spoke and breathed in secrets she wasn’t yet aware of. I watched the clothes gripped against her body, and swallowed the various lines and circles of her too-much makeup, like an freckled Madame Alexander doll. I raised my voice to answer for her in class, and shuddered in ecstasy when we came in contact at all. I watched my windows hum with her presence, and heard feminine voices whisper in her lilt, fast-paced and unanalyzed. In the night I kissed pillows pretending to be her, and listened to her every word, hoarding information in case one day she left me all alone. I spent hours trying to visualize her laugh, or brush my hair so I looked more like the boyfriends she had and discarded. I did numerous, countless things all in the hope that she would find me in the way that I had found her, that she would love me wholly and entirely, as she did in my thoughts. 


	2. Ferris Wheel Speech

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   **_Chapter 2:_ Ferris Wheel Speech**

            Most days I woke up to the sound of adolescence. Those ticking time-bombs of words seeping into my silence, erupting into a fit of messy beats that sounded more like quail wings wagging through moistened air, or the clicky speech of tribal people with soot-stained skin. The language was almost unintelligible, something spidery and water-logged that you listened to from the top of a Ferris wheel. I must assume that all those lengthy, primitive conversations that pedaled between my respective roommates are inscribed in my psyche. All those words spoken before I was awake must be wedged between the smell of bread and the lyrics to _Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds_. 

            I was notorious for my late awakenings, my slow, putty sleep that never really came. I was classified as an insomniac in the way that everyone is, hallmarked by one bizarre word that seemed to encompass the general view of an affliction. _Werewolf, wizard, playboy, masochist, liar, dreamer, insomniac._ All those words wadded together, stamped by the virtual “everybody” that seems to loom in youth. All those words surging around me, churning with their uneven edges, and protruding designs, all the things those words didn’t capture, didn’t attain. They were patterns which other lofty souls could follow if they were not fortunate enough to care. Most times when I was asked why I didn’t sleep I said “I am too busy thinking.” It’s an answer that is honest enough, I have too many billows of possibility to consider, too many thoughts to think and worries to worry.

            It was an anonymous morning when I happened upon a drab vision, a replayable scene that sagged in my consciousness like a shifty sconce, or a glossed chandelier.  It was in the midst of early and afternoon, the hollow calm of the in-between-hours that everyone seems to misplace as the days go on. I still felt soggy from my lack of sleep, frosty as underexposed film. I staggered down steps that my limbs knew inherently, that were encrypted in my modes of too-tired, or too-busy. 

            I found her standing below the steps, her hip slouched, full height bent like a molecular V. Her hair was down, churning like delicate curlicues at the end. Her skin was nearly transparent, so soft and pale that it looked like cashmere. The bridge of her nose and her forehead were greasy, moist with unwashing. A purple-brown halo was forming around her lifeless eyes, sliced like the rings of antique trees. She looked both frustrated and indifferent, a venerable feat. I wasn’t sure if she was even speaking to the boy standing next to her, or if she was watching for the loop of Venus in the window. 

            The two of them lingered like shadows along the frame of the door, tepid as ice water. The boy was tall with stringy limbs and arms that resembled vintage canes. He stood above her, but the rust-colored hair gurgling along her back, and web of veins littering her eyes made her look fierce and almost entranced. The hazard of those shifty parties she appeared at, blinking like a dot. 

             I watched them through the hollow of steps, a mirage of colored crystals, staring through a kaleidoscope haze. She thrummed her fingers against the solid bone in her hip; I tried to memorize the beat. Soft soft loud, hard soft, soft loud. I struggled in vain to translate that beat into my uncultivated silences, unkempt daydreams. The sight of her, the grainy illusion of her heart-shaped lips and the viscous hair lolling along her neckline made me woozy, almost queasy with fullness.

             They both looked miserable, unshaped and too quiet. I thought of how different it would be when we were together. We would stand in that same doorway, but I would push her up against the curled wood, outline her lips in mine and tell her that she was beautiful. I could picture us lying in bed together, watching the sun sink into far off glaciers, our teenage hearts vibrating.          

              I scaled the steps, falling heavier and heavier against each platform. The wood was spongy and worn, a trailway of flesh. I passed them, staring at my shoelaces, and the mousy stone beneath them.

              She spoke to him in whispers, low and confidential. “I just, I just can’t do _this_ anymore” It was a line plucked right out of a movie script. I knew that I was in the midst of another break-up, and I knew that _this_ referred to their relationship, but something about the way she said it indicated more. Lily said that word like the nameless, stringy he knew precisely what she meant. The tone, high-pitched and weedy, signified the hundreds of thousands of reasons behind it, junkyards full of reasons.

              I walked through the common room, down the lacquered marble steps, and out into the air. I didn’t hesitate along the path of sewn-in grass; I hiked for yards along the green flooring, following an unnamed map.  I entered the Forbidden Forest into a thicket of wooden pillars and dead leaves. I sat on a log overlooking the only pond held within those phantom walls. I had spent much of first year searching the grounds for solitude, looking through abandoned staircases and unopened rooms for somewhere that was isolated. Once I stepped foot into this monotone sphere, I’m not sure I ever really left. 

             I didn’t name it corny things like “My happy place!” or “Potter’s Hideaway!”; I let it be what it was, let it stay clandestine. I went there when my mind was uneasy, and sat for hours watching my own reflection smudge with the wind.            

             With stubs of wood I carved images of Lily’s eyes in the silt, tracing the circuit of veins connecting at every point. For days after that all I did in class was draw those glassy, vein-riddled eyes. I drew pages filled with them, staring back at me, reddened and sovereign. I outlined them over and over again until the blackness bled through the paper, and it still wasn’t deep enough, it never would be. I traced their outside until my fingers ached, and stared at the waves of eyeballs looking at me though inky lashes. Every sheet of notes was speckled with those eyes, up in the corner or along the margin; on the front, back, top, left. They were squiggled in-between words, and doodled inside textbooks. Her eyes haunted me, appearing along the rim of my dreams, splattered like red saucers. They were inflated, and shrunk, dipped in color and blanked into nothingness, into red fields of eyes that I couldn’t escape.   

_I_ had been present during one of her many break-ups. It felt surreal for the most part. I saw Stringy He on occasion. At dinner, face wilted, picking at his food, looking around, sighing uncountable, innumerable sighs. Walking to his next class, clutching books with whitened knuckles, snaking through the crowd. 

             I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, because that was her effect. That’s what she did to all of them. To all of us. She was addictive. You just couldn’t forget the insides of her arms, and that slow smile. Images of her ran deep in your psyche, her painted toes and floppy hair, and even more intimately, her naked breast, her puckered lips. She was instilled in your character, writhing against the pink of your insides. Lily Evans had a way permeating the soul. 

             It was unfortunate, all that power that she held unwittingly. We were all fixated on her, drawn in by her beauty, then mesmerized by her obscurity. She fit the form of murky shadows, and answered back when we called her in our thoughts. She followed us through our dreams, while we tried to find her outside them.

             There were so many of us, gathering in hoards, reminiscing about her shaggy clothes, adorned most days in lace, ty-dye, fringes. She had an unspeakable charisma which made every thing about her feel distinctly intimate, unshared. We lined up as suitors ready to polish her with praise, pepper her with love. We all clamored at her touch, shrunk away from that blatant, unblinking stare of hers. 

              But it was all words anyway, wasn’t it? All these sundry sounds that went on for lightyears, which never stopped. There was the single-word labels and Lily’s movie-made letdown. There was the sun-moistened flow of conversation, and the words that subsisted in the womb of my imagination, the millions of words that were never said, never heard. I couldn’t begin to fathom their number, the vastness of syllable-split phrases that we all depended on, or didn’t; lived by or forgot. 

              Along with all those words, and all their meanings came the things that they implied, the subject matter they were bound to and the stereotypes they reinforced. Words were showing up everywhere now, just as I had lost all of mine. They filled journals, newspapers and books, notes, letters, songs, voices. They spawned creation and mangled flesh; words were bullets you never died from, that lingered with you till the day you died, and even past then. Once they were said they were never retracted, only haply misplaced from time to time.

              It was hard to think about all my conversations, all that speech bleeding from the seams. I sat on that rotting log thinking about words, looking down at the hieroglyphics of teenage woe; the deep, sand-crusted diary of an elusive girl through the eyes of her unrequited lover. The more I reflected on the verbal side of life the less was excluded. The cosmic quality sent me reeling. All this thought of words was noxious, because I knew so many of them, spoke so many words throughout my lifetime but I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out the right ones to make her love me. 

_______________

**A/N:**   I wrote this chapter at midnight with the semi-flu, so naturally I'm a bit nervous about it. Reviews would be _lovely_ :)


	3. Spaghetti Skies

**_ Chapter 3_ : Spaghetti Skies **

            I returned home to a sky swabbed with blackness. I made my way across the green inlet, up the swishy steps, and back to my dorm. I wasn’t even sure why I left in the first place. Laila, Sirius’ cat, sat against his bed forming a dimple in the sheets. She was a Tokinese with fur the color of mushrooms, as smooth as plexi-glass. She wore mismatched eyes: one blue, one brown. “One for every occasion!” Sirius insisted. Often times I loved her for her silence, for the waddle of her tail and the pudgy inside of her stomach.

            I sat watching the space above Sirius’ bed, trying to read the language webbing his walls. He had written song lyrics and book quotes, hundreds of tiny letters scrawled against fading white paint. It had been crafted over years, added to slowly and carefully. When I was upset I usually found my way there. I read through the quotes until I found one that matched my mood. It was our very own wailing wall. 

            The words were written in an assortment of inks and lead. Some were penciled in and others dipped from quills. There were different hand-writings, different sizes and boldness’s but all we could see was the same loopy script speaking volumes of our uncertainty. It was written in no particular order: there were small sayings written slanted and sideways, leaving empty gaps like the space between clouds. It was a montage of thoughts and feelings, a patchwork quilt that was cobbled out of philosophy, stitched together with our misguided hope. 

            It had stayed there since first year, god knows how. I think the House Elves saw it for what it was. They read it as a cryptic poem. To them it was a tribute to the life of wizards, though they couldn’t read a word of it. Every now and then one of us would wander over to the wall and silently inscribe our thoughts, etch them into the very walls we inhabited. It was a scribbled shrine in the making, a map of our lives. 

            My favorite was still a quote by a young Robert Frost:

_Lovers, forget your love,_

_And list to the love of these,_

_She a window flower,_

_And he a winter breeze._

            Sirius erupted from the doorway, his hair long and rippled. “What are you doin’ mate? Trying to soak of some of my esscence, eh.”

            “Just thinking”

            “I see you’ve been trying to steal my lady” He feigned indignation as he slid up against the side of the bed and picked up Laila, spilling through his hands. He sighed “I think I need a bit of a nap”

            “Its 8:00 mate, you can go straight to sleep if you’d like”

            “Is that so?” Sirius always retained a calm demeanor. His voice was low and steady. His tone hardly ever changed, it always had the same rhythm, the same slow manner. 

             On the occasional weekend I would find him holed up in our dorm room reading Carl Sandberg’s poetry or streaming his way through the books surrounding his bed. Most of the time he seemed vaguely bored, like he was weary of such an ordinary life. His self-acquired charm and natural distaste for authority made him a fine individual. He was mellow and open-minded. He loved the Rolling Stones and incense and often he seemed much older than I was. He seemed, above all, wise. 

            “God, can you believe that tomorrow is Monday? The beginning all over again.” Tomorrow was indeed Monday. It was Quidditch and work and class. It was watching Lily twist her hair into ringlets, and seeing her waft through the hallways. My weekdays were jagged and planned-out, they were unceasing. 

           “Happens every week doesn’t it? It’s _always_ Monday again.”  Sirius ambled into sleep shortly after while I sat up in bed drawing linen wands with deep shadows and drifts of caves. Peter and Remus arrived somewhere around 9:30.

          “Studying” Remus announced. He looked tired and sallow; his pupils were large from the darkness, sinking into the lace of night-time. 

          Peter clambered into bed. “It’s so cold in here. I mean, my feet are freezing!” He huddled beneath his bedspread. “Don’t you wish that there were little blankets that you could just, I don’t know, just place right above your feet, and you could tie that down like Gulliver’s Travels?” 

          “Yeah Pete, that would be pretty groovy. But hey, what about, oh I don’t know, _Socks_?” 

          He blushed slightly “Yeah but I can’t sleep with socks. They are so hot and confining! It’s like little straight-jackets for your feet, y’know? I mean, they just drive me crazy.”

          “Oh because little tents for your feet are much better” We all had a good laugh from that. Peter’s quirks were so distinct; he was a spirit of idiosyncrasies and over-contemplation. His parents’ were watchful, almost to the point of suffocation. They tried to stifle any defective qualities he had, wanted him to be _a good person._ They forced him to realize that there were consequences for his unsavory actions, but in doing so made him believe that there were consequences for _all_ of his actions. He was perpetually thinking that he had done something wrong; he was constantly aware of who was watching. He was also light-hearted and attentive. He loved humor and privacy as well as dessert and the sticky heat of summer. 

           Years later when he became weary of the needs of others and began to live his life in the open, I took it as his rebellion. He smoked cigarettes in front of his parent’s and contracted some incurable virus. He walked into rooms cursing, wearing lavish suits he couldn’t afford. He discarded all the rules he once lived by, if only to exist as the one person he used to fear. We were baffled as to where the teenage boy who loved carrot cake and comic books had gone, but we all believed that it was merely transitory. 

                                                                                                   _______________

            I rose early for Quidditch, wiping the patches of sleep from my eyes. I was hushed and syrupy during the mornings, eating breakfast alone and watching the pace of my day quicken. 

            The Quidditch pitch was boundless with green, ringed with tall stands and hovering in a globe of nature, of purity. It was mid-march and everything felt slow and surreal, steeped in the knowledge that things were changing. When I looked up through the sky I always felt mildly surprised to notice it. It felt strange to watch the swamp of clouds align into rows of pallor, watery with halos. The air looked flaxen most days, like spaghetti strings looping past me. Most people told me that they saw shapes in the clouds but my skies were cloaked in arcane messages and lost souls swimming through stone. 

            Quidditch was, for me, somewhat nondescript. It was the only thing that I was instinctively good at. It resided in the catacomb of my past lives; it sprung from the willows of foresight. Often times I wasn’t aware because of the highly innate quality. I _felt_ my fingers clasp around my broom, felt the yelp of wind, followed jumpy orbs with my eyes. I did it all to the point of numbness. I hardly felt myself breathe during those hours spent up in the sky; it was all sensation and dulled notions. 

             I flew through blindness. It was the ultimate escape; everyday I could just ebb into the grass and churn in the stands, give my thoughts a rest. It had built strange muscles along my torso, slipped strength under my arms and along my ribs. Suddenly with that body I could win fist-fights effortlessly and soak in sweat until I could hardly move. Quidditch eliminated the power of my body. I trained my flesh to pulse with the wind and move when I willed it to. It gave my control over the only tangible thing in my life, left me with one less worry.

            Remus watched us practice sometimes, typically a few days before the full moon. He could have made the team but his wealth of sick days and puzzling disappearances would be unacceptable. On occasion he would haul Peter and Sirius along with him, crafting one of the most soothing sights I can recall. Remus leaned up against the scruffy wood feeling complacent. Sirius sitting with a book in his hands making jokes every couple of minutes and watching me with a sloppy half-smile. Peter looking supremely concentrated, his brow furrowed as the plays shifted between us. The image of the three of them sitting in the early light of dawn was framed in my memories as how things should be, their silhouettes bleeding against the bleachers.

            Remus loved rocks. The windowsill above his bed was lipped in rocks that he had found along the grounds. They were glassy, or rough. Brown, pickled, broken, pointed, round, smooth, cracked in half. When he was a child he would sit in vats of stones running his fingers along their edges, plunging his hands beneath their rubble and wearing the pebbles like rings. He had explained it to me a long time ago, told me that he loved rocks because they were classifiable, and pure. Rocks were explainable with their dusted beauty and blocky names. Rocks had no emotions and no worries, all they had was an inert past. Rocks, as he told me, never changed. 

            He confessed that he wanted to be a geologist someday, a fitting career. I could picture him making sprawling lists of data, and letting his eye bulge from behind calibrated magnifying lenses. He would wear chunky eyeglasses and handle the rocks with such delicacy because he loved them in the way the Sirius loved Laila, and Peter loved privacy; in the way that I loved Lily. 

                                                                                                       _______________

            That night at dinner I reflected on my best friends, those three strange boys who I shared my room with, who I knew too much about. They were unanimously flawed, but their intricacy astonished me. My life was seemed plain in comparison, far more compartmentalized. I lived on Quidditch, food, and regularity. I wasn’t sure how much of a life I would have without them. How on earth would I spend my time without Sirius’ Wailing Wall, Remus’ rock collection, and Peter’s assortment of sweets tucked in a crate below his bed? If it weren’t for them, for Laila and that open space buried in the forest, who would I care for?    

            They were all awe-inspiring because of the demons they fought and the wars they waged. Sirius wrestled against his family and his obligation, Peter against the stern teachings of his parents and his own fear, Remus against his lycanthropy and the alternate egos he populated. I was left raging against my own thoughts.

            That night with my eyes crystallized and my thoughts humming amid questions of the future, something changed. I sat on the sturdy bench beneath the tides of yellow candles looking out at the crowd of my peers, smiling and eating-oblivious enough to be _living_. My eyes snagged on the oval of Lily’s face. She was laughing at something, her chin quaking with mirth. She held perfect posture, and patted her hand against the table like a tribal drum. Then, in a split-second I saw her glance over at me. I watched the intensity of her eyes lock with mine, as she smiled daintily. It was a gaze meant for spring bliss, for being outside and falling in love. She saw me, if only for a second, she saw me. 

            I should have known that it was the beginning of something. I should have understood the spark in that smile, the possibility it hid. I should have seen it in the sky, sailing in the grass. I should have known that things were changing. 


	4. The Great Escape

**_ Chapter 4_ : The Great Escape **

            I had officially sworn off alcohol (something fairly common between the four of us) once I woke up Saturday morning under the fiery lens of a hangover. After spending the better hours of Friday night throwing up on the stiff, chilly floor of the Hog’s head restroom I was certain that I would never drink again.            

            Saturday’s sun was ribbed with nectar while the clouds blew kisses across the east end of the castle. Years later I would remember that day; it was the weathered smiles of my classmates and sunscape licking the walls. 

            I wasted the afternoon hours reclining in a bed of pillows. The four of us swept in and out of the room. We were everywhere at once; engulfing the kitchen, walking to the library, taking a nap. We were dispersed through the school standing tall next to librarians and house elves. We didn’t speak much, mostly floated through the hours in a fog.

            Remus, Peter and Sirius converged at the door checking their pockets for cash and rubbers. Sirius yawned as he picked hairs off his coat and grimaced at his nails. Bored by profession. 

            “We’re off.” Declared Remus.

            “Where to?”

            “Pub, time to fill our mugs and drown our worries mate.”

            “Oh how I’ve missed my good friend Jack Daniels.” It was Peter’s favorite saying. He always found a way to worm it into the conversation on the days we went out drinking. 

            “C’mon Pete, is that the best you can do?”

            “Wetting the whistle, loading up, eating some yeast, bending an elbow” His voice blew deep and animated “ _Getting buzzed on suds_ ”. 

            They left in a jumble with voices trailing like shadows. Sirius joked about his dry spell calling himself “The Randy Man” as Peter griped about a potions assignment gone awry. Their voices dulled with the distance until they were too rutted to distinguish. 

                                                                        _______________

            I was nomadic most days; always roaming from place to place sifting in-between walls, traversing fields and spanning hedges. I couldn’t stay still even in my dreams. At night I was scaling the edges of raw, frosted mountain ranges or submerged in a marine strata probing for puka shells and oysters. At best I was scatter-brained; at worst I was profoundly lost. 

            The hallways were slick with silence. I wasn’t used to being so alone. Around nine o’clock I wandered down to the common room. A portrait called to me in the hallway her voice layered and sing-song. "All alone on a Saturday night? What a shame! Where are those friends of yours, Luppin and Pettibrew?". It wasn’t something I planned or thought about; it wasn’t even something I could feel happening. It was something mapped by the fates, their singed laughter burning holes through the sky. 

            Even from far off I saw her. I recognized the tawny hair, burnished and sloped to the side. My whole body jolted. The surprise clung to my throat, pulling daggers against my tongue. Lily Evans sat no more than a few yards away from me in the common room gazing at the fire place. Her knees were pressed together with her feet curled outward. Her elbows were resting in her lap and her hands were clasped around her chin. She sat like a bored school girl, a pose well-practiced. I was immobile. 

            She sat on the wide, scorching red sofa that reminded me of Scarlett fever and meadows of bleeding poppies. Slowly, without breathing I made my way to a leather chair. We sat in the stillness watching the fire bubble and shatter and implode. The colors wove together and bled upwards forming a cloth. It felt like so long sitting in her presence with my heart smashing at every beat. 

            I could see her peer over at me, tilting her head to the side. She rolled her eyes along my shirt and across my mouth, drinking in the color from my cheeks. Suddenly a voice flamed from her lips. It was muted and battered in the night-time air. “I wish I was messed up.” 

            “I, uh, I have some stuff upstairs.” With my stomach pandering I spoke those first six words to Lily Evans in the hollow of the Gryffindor common room under the silvery hue of night time.

            “Cool.” Lily Evans was not like other girls. She didn’t ask what _stuff_ I had or who I was. She made no attempt to be coy and insist that she really didn’t want to trouble me. She gave me no strange looks or embarrassed apologies. She simply smiled at me and said _cool._

                                                                      _______________

            I walked behind her watching her head bob up the steps and climb through the igloo of stone pasted all around us. She walked along the corridors, twisting back to ensure I was still there. I pulled at the hinge of our door letting us into the abandoned room. Things were strewn everywhere, bed sheets still wrinkled and empty bottles tipped along the floor. The stillness felt man-made, held down by glue and pliers. She walked around the room caressing the walls with her fingers and touching the wood of our bed posts, the dilapidated cloth of our textbooks and inkwells. I remember wishing that her fingers bled paint.

            I sat on my bed and pulled out a petite, marble square. The edge was sleek with polish, the top sealed with tin. It revealed a clear bag of green foam. The pot curved and decked; patching together like a farm from the sky. 

            “You’re James, right?”

            “Yeah.” She nodded and my stomach shriveled into knots. 

            Lily bounced onto the bed next to me, climbing on all fours and then pressing her spine to the wall. She wore a sweatshirt and legs bunched in culottes. I suppose it should have felt more surreal to have Lily Evans sinking into my mattress and smiling absently with those big, pulpy lips. It should have, but it didn’t. I had always believed that we would converge somewhere along the line, I was only waiting for her to surface.

            I rolled a joint the way Sirius taught me in fourth year. Bent the edge in, dipped the weed into the cavity, pulled towards me rolling tightly. I licked the side and sealed it, winding the edges in. She watched over my shoulder as the paper morphed into a small white stick. “Smells good” She noted. Pot smelled strongly, it always had, but the exact aroma was impossible to pinpoint. Peter would always chuckle and insist that it smelled like heaven and Remus thought that it reeked of Indian Spice. My favorite was still Sirius’ response “It smells like dead leaves and cum, that simple man”

            Using my metal lighter I lit the edge and took a deep puff tasting the paper and the hot, sweet air. Lily inhaled sharply coughing now and then. The smoke sailed out of our lips in streams. “So, why aren’t you out with your friends or something? It’s a Saturday night after all”

            “I could ask the same of you.”

            “All my mates are off at the Hog’s Head getting trashed and I didn’t care to join them.”

            She pursed her lips and talked directly at me, watching my eyes. “I know what you mean. It gets old after a while. It’s the same people and the same thing every day and you just can’t get away from it.”

            “You could. I mean, if you really wanted to.” We passed the joint back and forth until everything slipped under a mist. I put on Pink Floyd because I thought it was classic, lit incense to coat the smell. 

            She turned her whole body towards me “So James,” She bit her lip, stifling a laugh. “How would you plan the Great Escape?”

            “Hm. I would probably go to the Galapagos or maybe Costa Rica. Somewhere warm. And you?”

            “I would find some random guy and run away to an island, just never look back.” The way she talked about leaving was so wistful. “I wouldn’t say goodbye to anyone.”

            “Why would you go with a,” Cough “A random guy?”

            “Because I already know the people here, I’ve already fallen in and out of love and it’s not so great. I wouldn’t want any complications”

            “Mmmm.”

            “Hey James, you could be my random guy,” She laughed. “My fella.” The thought of following Lily through her fictitious journey made me elated. I could picture us walking through green island forest, slipping our arms around the air, living among beaches. “We could just, run away.” I knew that she didn’t love me, not even close. She was charming, she was flirty and I happened to be the object of her interest at the moment. It was thrilling. 

            “Seems like you’ve thought about this.”

            “Once or twice.” Silence. “God, I’m so hungry. I could eat fish or a cow. Whatever that bloody saying is.” She laughed. I had forgotten how giggly girls got when they were high. I could feel her laughter piling onto me, sinking onto my chest like hot weight, soft and pliable. She giggled at everything and it wasn’t a bad thing because her hair fell out of her bun and her teeth showed when she laughed like that.

            “Do you want to go down to the kitchens or something?” 

            “No need.” I knelt in front of Peter’s bed.

            “James,” She called from across the room. “You realize that you are sitting on the floor, right?”

            “Yes.”

            “What, are you looking for his dirty mags or something?”

            “Not quite.”

            “Mmm.” Her smile curved floppy. 

            I slid a large crate veined in black plastic from under the bed. “Peter’s sweet supply.” 

            “My goodness, you are so well-equipped.”

            “I try.”

            “Evidently.” Mounds of laughter pressing against me. 

                                                                        _______________

             

           My bed was flushed with candy-wrappers. Crayon colors swept the sheets; macaroni yellow and summer sky pink. There were fluorescent greens and half-eaten candies like cauliflower weeds. They all sat there tending to our hunger, weighing on our stomachs. 

           Without warning Lily jumped up "James, let’s go outside."                                                                                         

           "Why?"

           "It’s so dark and cool out there, don’t you want to feel it? Even for just a minute?" I could tell that her impaired state of mind gave her visions of grandeur. She pulled at my hand, at the door knob, at the railing. I could feel her pulling at my edges from every angle. I was unraveling at her touch.  

           We crept down the steps. Without the slightest hesitation she ripped the door open into the liquid black air. "Come on!" She spoke in stage-whispers. Despite the fact that it was past the time allowed for leaving the building and the fact that it was as cold as ice outside, I followed her. I would have followed her for light-years if I could.

           Her legs pranced among the grass, she was looping and swerving. She was running farther and farther from me. "C’mere!" She waved her hands but all I could think about was their thin, flat shape. How her fingers were extruding from the very soul I wanted to find. I jogged after her in the darkness. As soon as I came near she would start running, begging me to chase her, to catch her. We ran in circles, in diamonds and squares and triangles. We covered every shape forming squiggled lines of footsteps; an abstract doodle that sealed and swished within itself. 

           She dropped to the ground heaving with a rasp in her breath. The air smelled feverant, the hints of fire and charred ingredients speaking of ill-mastered spells and unwanted urses.  I stood a few yards away thinking, really thinking for the first time that whole night. I was here with Lily Evans, the girl that I spent so much of my time trying to deconstruct. Here she was lying on the grass, pulsing with breathe. I was suddenly overcome with the urge to throw up. It was not actual throw up but one of those deep, sinking feelings imbedded in your abdomen; clawing at you. I could not believe that it was happening. I simply could not comprehend how after all these months and years of waiting she was sprawled out in front of me with the bottom of her shirt skidding up to expose the white skin of her stomach.

           That night became not only a turning point but a point of reference. Everything was either before or after that night. There was other relationships, events, moments; there were memories and personality changes that all existed in sects relating to the night where I first felt the real Lily Evans. It was the beginning and the end, the midpoint of change that I always swung back to, that I always remembered. 

          She patted her hand against the plot beside her, beckoning for me to sit down. I did, pressing my whole body to the earth waiting for it to swallow me whole. 

           "So."

           "So."

            “If you could,” We lay side by side. “Change one thing about the world, any one thing, what would it be?” I learned that in addition to being a reckless flirt Lily Evans had a habit of asking arbitrary questions. I did, and would always, try to answer them. 

            “I, I guess I couldn’t just change one thing. I’d have to change everything.”

            “How poetic.” 

           “It’s true. Things don’t just change so quickly, they’re all linked.”

           “Like Jenga.”

           I nodded, laughing. “Like Jenga.”

           “So you wouldn’t change anything?”

           “Nah, it wouldn’t be worth it.”

           “I guess you’re right. I mean our world is so fucked up I wouldn’t know where to start.”

           “Fucked up indeed.” 

           “Think about it. Everyday people get murdered and raped and robbed and beaten. Everyday there’s some alcoholic husband beating his wife or pervert running amok. Our world is beyond sick. I can’t walk down the goddamn street at night without being terrified that something is going to happen.”

          “What are you scared of?”

          She scoffed. “Everything. I’m scared of stereotypes and death; I’m scared of not really living my life, of never falling in love, of missing all my chances. I’m scared of disappointment and being alone. I’m scared of motherhood, of the future. And I mean all of it in that abstract sense. I’m terrified of everything, but only below my skin. Only deep enough so that it doesn’t show.” 

          The eloquence with which she spoke surprised me. For such a pretty girl she spoke like a scholar, like some rice-paper deity. I had never known Lily Evans to be someone plagued by fears and I would come to learn that she wasn’t. Though all those words detailed her worries, in her real life they were few and far between. It must have been the pot and the celestial black because it turned out to be one of the few nights she ever spoke of those fears, that she let them swallow her.  

          “You’re lucky.”

          “Oh and how is that?”

          “Well, all your fears are reasonable, they’re understandable. They’re more irrational than anything else.” 

          “I don’t think fears can be irrational.”

          “Maybe not.”

          “What are you afraid of? It’s probably a lot more rational than you think.”

          “I have those normal fears, being alone and all, but there are others. I’m scared of forgetting my friends, like one day I’m going to pass them on the street and not even recognize their voice. I’m terrified of dieing in my sleep. I’m practically scared of sleep itself. And I guess my biggest fear,” I looked her straight in the eye for the first time that night, for the first time in my entire life. “Is that my soul mate will never find me.”

         She looked feral, blinking and chewing on the skin of her lip. “Those aren’t so unfounded, they’re just specific. I mean, it’s brave to know exactly what you’re scared of. Me, I’m just stuck with these wishy-washy fears. You’re the lucky one James.”

         “Must be that old Gryffindor courage, eh?”

         “Guess so.” 

         She paused. “Do you know what time it is?”

         “Yeah, one sec” I strained to read my watch in the dark. “It’s 11:15.”

         “Well I should probably be going.”

         “I, alright.” Blades tore at my throat. There was no way to stop her. All I could think was ‘what if this is the last time I find her? What if this is it?’

         Her lips, as blushed and candied as grenadine, spoke in a lull. “Thank you James Potter, for being the great escape.” She sprinted across the grass, deserting me all over again. Her hair bounced further and further until the red looked black and her limbs looked clipped. I ambled to my room and fell into a gaping, dreamless sleep for the first time in years.

                                                                    __________________

**A/N** : Dialogue and action and plot-lines, OH MY! This chapter gave me unthinkabe ammounts of grief, but here it is. I want to thank all my reviewers for being not only my biggest source of inspiration but an endless fountain of thought, improvement and support. This chapter was a toughy so I'd love to hear what you all think :)


	5. Table-Top Thought

**_ Chapter 5_ : Table-top Thought **

            I spent the morning at the round table facing the window smoking cigarettes and coughing through crowns of smoke. I felt like my cousin. She was fourteen and staying with us for the summer. She got home late, turned to me and said “I lost my virginity,” as she sat at our table chain-smoking my mother’s cigarettes, tears sitting in her eyes. She stared at me, pulling tobacco into her mouth “Do you think I’m a whore?” The complacency in her voice made me both anxious and unbelievably sad. I was too young to understand the question but I told her no. 

            Here I was, doing the very same thing. I imagine generations of my family spent their worries sitting at tables-timber or plastic, carved, expensive, stained-smoking until they couldn’t breathe. We were a set of deniers, sipping our pain with brandy and devouring mistresses half our age. The women were the same. They scrubbed the house clean of the welts of ex-husbands and disappointing children. Our bowels were spiked with glass. We were harmless until we were broken.

            Sirius plopped onto a chair, straddling it backwards. “What’s going on mate?”

            I shook my head no. Nothing is going on. 

            “You sure ‘bout that? Because last I recall you don’t smoke cigarettes.”

            “I do now.” 

            “Alright, new vice. I’m down for that. Pass me one, yeah.” I pulled out a white-washed stripe; it looked like the missing piece of a picket fence. We smoked, feeling the tanged-brown substance dissolve, swept into our lungs and blood streams. I felt muggy and sick but I was too goddamn lost for anything else. 

            On one hand I had no clue how I felt, on the other I knew precisely. I didn't know how I _should_ feel. I wondered if I should recount our conversations, because surely I could. Would I tell anyone? No, I couldn’t. At least not yet. I wasn’t sure how I would explain, how the words would form. I was like a bride mouthing “I do” in the mirror, words like vials dotting her thoughts _my husband, married for three years now, on my wedding night._

            At the same time, I felt raw. I expected to feel elated or fearful or empty, but I felt nothing of the sort. It was wrong, wasn’t it? This pink, exposed emotion I was drowning in. It was as if layers of flesh like rock stratum, were cut away. Her words were scalpels and knives, sloppy guns peeling off my skin, dragging away something heavy and wet. I felt not only naked but severed, cleaved into bits. I popped red and lucid but nobody could see it. Was I now some medical phenomena? Or had nothing really changed… had it all just been a dream?

                                                                             _______________

            Sunday was smoke and thought; it rose and curled, wept in balls before me. I didn’t do any work, I couldn’t. My notebooks and parchment and ink packets lay untouched. The thought of writing seemed absurd to me; school like some monstrous prank. How on earth could people work when there were women like Lily Evans who flirted you into oblivion, when there was sex like monster truck shows? How did anyone concentrate when love existed? It seemed blasphemous.  

            I entered class unprepared. Remus had thrown his potions essay at me “At least copy it,” but I couldn’t see the point. The potions master, Mr.Marguiles, called across the room “Got your essay Potter?” 

_“James,” She called from across the room. “You realize that you are sitting on the floor, right?”_

I said “No Sir.” He spoke half-heartedly “15 points from Gryffindor.” We were ordered to make a batch of Wellwerts Tilly (named after the creator), a mixture that soothed Wizard’s Warts.I looked on hopelessly as Remus and Peter and Sirius read notes aloud adding question-marks and stewing over which to add first, looking befuddled and tired. They must have thought I was so selfish as I sat there with my chin on the desk, not helping, not even saying a word. But they were good friends, they didn’t get huffy or yell at me to sit up and contribute. I felt guilty, but it was a restless half-guilt that I hardly paid attention to. 

In my other classes I took notes on pages still bubble-stained with Lily’s eyes. I tried not to look at her but when I did she was staring at her side, blinkless underneath the scotch-ceilings and quavered voices speaking in whispers and shouts. I felt like we were the only two people in the room, the rest were screaming masses, cells and cyclones of talk and breath. They knew nothing about profundity, about love.

                                                                             _______________

            At lunch I piled my plate with food, but I couldn’t eat a bite of it. I was starving, but I was hungry in so many different ways that it seemed fruitless to feed one hunger and deny the others.            

            “I hate school.” Peter said exhaling loudly. 

            Sirius responded. “You know, there’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYONE and that meet at the pub on Fridays.”

            “Oh shut it.”

            “How _was_ the pub?” I asked, vying for normalcy.

            “As good as one can hope for.”

            “Very true Sirius, Fire Whiskey and weekends always produce something agreeable.” 

            “What did you do James?” Remus, always so kind.            

            “Nothing, just hung around the room.”

            “Like a lump.” Noted Peter.

            “Yeah, like a lump.”

            “You need a girlfriend mate.” 

            “We all need girlfriends, yeah.”

            “I say we set up some crazy tournament, name it something like ‘Win the Marauder’s Hearts: A Journey’. We could have girl’s running through tires shirtless and mud wrestling and competing in cook-a-thons.”

            “Real classy Peter.” 

            “Thank-you Remus, I try.”

_“My goodness, you are so well-equipped”_

_“I try”_

I stood up “Excuse me guys, but I need a smoke.” Sirius looked up at me, narrowing his eyes to ask if I was alright.

            “I think I’ll join you.”

            “Since when did you two become nicotine fiends?” Peter looked suspicious. 

            “Since yesterday, apparently.” Sirius answered for me. We walked out of the Great Hall and past chattering paintings, through the same door Lily and I escaped from.

            “Where are you getting all these fags from on such short notice?” He seemed interested, mildly amused even.

            “Amos Diggory,”

            “Really? Didn’t he used to date that Lily Evans girl?” 

_Lily Evans sat no more than a few yards away from me in the common room gazing at the fire place._

            Yes. “No, no I don’t think so.”

            “I’m pretty sure they did. They were rather hot and heavy if I remember-”

            “No. I’m quite sure they never dated.” 

            “Alright mate, no need to get all worked up by it.”

            “I’m not worked up, I’m…”

            “Yes, what exactly are you because I haven’t the slightest clue.”

            It was a hard question. I was ecstatic and anxious and deluded and changed. “I’m drained.”

            “May I ask why? When we came home last night you were dead asleep, and that’s a first.”

            “It has nothing to do with that.” 

            “Alright,” He nodded. “Alright.”

                                                                              _______________

            After the roar of lunch died down I headed to Charms and then Ancient Runes. I slept in my classes, feeling depleted. I daydreamed not of Lily but of dry, monochrome rooms. Brand new walls thin as fingernails, floor a vivid, glistening wood. I dreamt about being clean and whole because, for the time being, I felt bloodied. I still felt unformed. 

            I took to analyzing my teachers. For Charms there was Mr.Heely, a large, elegant man who wore silver-rimmed spectacles and personally tailored suits. He always sat on a low stool and he slapped his knee when he laughed. He was a nice man, head of Ravenclaw for years. I had once appeared at his desk begging to change a failing grade. He held up a fat, wobbly hand and said “Alright my boy. No need to worry, no need at all.” 

            Our Ancient Runes teacher was named Juliette Kirkham (We felt scandalous knowing her first name, information passed on from someone’s unknowing aunt.) Mrs. Kirkham was still very young, through not particularly attractive. She had bug eyes that sat too far apart, a nose that was flat but wide at the brim. She wore her hair in long, neat ponytails for as long as I could remember. 

             Three days later I was slumped at my desk in Ancient Runes watching her speak out of my peripheral vision. Sirius and Peter sat on either side of me (Remus attended Muggle Studies that period). I was contemplating what animal she resembled-an owl or a merekat-when I felt a finger dabbing at me, as soft as a paintbrush.

              I spun around to see Lily Evans smiling at me, her skin covered in a sheath of freckles. They swallowed her face. 

              “Hi.” 

              In my head all I heard was ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ But I managed “Hi…” It was unexpected. She was breaking the code, bringing that night out of our damp, hazed recollection.

              She bent forward, almost giggling “Could I borrow a quill?”

              “Um… yeah, sure. One sec.”

_She paused. “Do you know what time it is?”_

_“Yeah, one sec,” I strained to read my watch in the dark. “It’s 11:15.”_

            She was surrounded by her friends; a dark-haired girl watched the interaction. I pulled out a quill, handed it to her making sure our fingers didn’t touch. “Thanks.”

            I could still feel her watching the back of my head, caressing my hair and earlobes Those eyes were scalding hot. I was used to watching her-the details could have filled spiral-bound masses-but this feeling was different. It was uncomfortable and nerve-wracking. All I heard was the sound of a quill being tapped or scratching words. 

            I soon returned to the fizzy feeling. I wondered why I had been upset in the first place. I was _wonderfully, blissfully_ raw.  The air was sunny and budded, I spent my last Saturday with Lily Evans and a few minutes ago she solicited a quill. Things were road mapped and blooming with possibility. Hope as thick as lead gummed my thoughts. No wonder I was daydreaming about pure, clean rooms. I was simpler now. Instead of her deconstruction, I had taken part in my own. 

                                                                         _______________

**A/N** :I must confess that this chapter was finished two days after I posted four but I waited until 40 reviews (Thank-you !). I know, I'm such a bad person. Anywho, what d'ya guys think (and how was your Saint Pattie's day!)?


	6. Cheshire Cat Style

**_ Chapter Six: _ ** ** Cheshire Cat Style **

            Two weeks later Lily re-entered my life. My sleeping habits had changed. I was getting up early or folding into bed before dusk. I lived for the soir or else the daylight, but most of all I lived for sleep. What else was there to do?

            On this day, I woke up early. I made my way to the window and found myself beneath an electric sky with trees forming tall bruises of ink. It was the most intense blue I had seen. That blue made me want to leak of confession and pray to my sins. I wanted to profess my love and fall head first into a canyon. I wanted to tell someone about my real life, about the life of secrets. How I burned three volumes of journals from age nine to age thirteen because I wanted that self to die, how  I couldn’t swallow too many pills at one time because it made me sick. 

           This blue told of a place so wild it would penetrate the marrow of my bones. I would remember that color forever and a day because it was a revelation. For a moment I could recall every crime I committed, every secret I held.  It was chalk writing the words of my secrets, penning the sky blue of honest remarks. 

                                                                                                  _______________

            The rest of the day passed slowly. Not horribly slow, but uneventfully slow. The biding blue diffused into a soft light. A baby blue that colored cribs and blankets. Sirius had taken up swearing in German. I liked the harsh tones speaking love like anger. He had mastered the accent so I could hear my old nanny or the German chocolate-maker in Little Whinging, shouting at the children who tried to shoplift. 

            When Mr. Heely passed back our essays Sirius’s gleamed red with a “D”. He stood up abruptly and pointed at  the stocky man yelling “Aschloch! Triple Aschloch!” [Asshole! Triple Asshole!] in his finest German form. The entire class lit up in laughter. They hadn’t a clue what he said but unfortunately, Mr. Heely was fluent in German. Sirius was sentenced to dinner-time detention for the next two weeks. He simply shrugged and muttered “That wichsler [wanker] deserved it.” Grinning he added “It might do me some good.”

            “Are you joking?”

            “No Peter, not particularly.”

            We walked out of class jovial. His humor sent tremors throughout the day. We would be sitting in class and hear the sudden chuckles of a classmate who was, no doubt, picturing Sirius bold against the transparent podium. 

            It felt like things were returning to normal.

                                                                                                _______________

            Lunch was lunch. We talked, we ate, and Remus sought coffee for us. It was stated that pupils were not allowed to drink coffee beverages because it “stunted growth” and supplied “excess energy” that could disrupt daily activity. It shows that even elite wizarding schools had bullshit rules.   

            “This is unjust.” Sirius had become a caffeine addict over his summers. A habit we were all convinced would lead him to be a speed freak.

            “We should make a petition or, or a rally.” 

            “Yes Peter,” I spoke with sarcasm. “Let’s call ourselves the coffee conservers. We fight for justice, freedom and readily available caffeine.”

            “Are you saying that you are against our cause James?”

            “That’s _quite_ unacceptable.” Sirius held a glint in his eye.

            “I’m not against the cause, god knows I could go for some coffee now and then, but don’t you think it’s a bit, oh I don’t know, minor?”

            “Minor causes do not exist my friend.” 

            “Ah yes, I see.”

            “So who wants to get the coffee?” Three fingers shot to three noses accompanied by three ‘Shot-not!’.            

            “Too slow Remus, run along now.”

            “But-”

            “No, no but’s, only coffee my dear boy.” Remus shook his head half-grinning and wandered off in search of some joe. 

            Sirius turned to us, “Simple man, simple tactics.”

            “Simple?” I sniffed. “Excuse me, but aren’t you the same boy who taught himself German?”

            “No. I taught myself swear words in German, very different. And yes, I am simple to the tee. Sirius Black. Eat. Sleep. Shag.”

            “Not so much the last part, eh.”

            “That will all change soon enough.”

            “Of course it will.”

            “Do you doubt me?”

            “For the most part, yes.”

            “Anyone like to take a bet?”

            “Nope.” Said Peter.

            Remus returned from the kitchen out of breath holding four steaming mugs. “Three Months.”

            “Oh Mr. Lupin, you jest!”

            “Four months then.” Before we knew it we were all betting on Sirius’s shag time. I wagered two months and Peter half a year. Sirius was mildly offended, but determined.Lunch bled into class which bled into a thick sun and eventually dinner. Sirius wandered to the Potions Dungeon with a mischievous face. Poor Mr. Heely had no clue what he got himself into. Sirius was mellow about all things, but authority brought out his inner-hooligan. Remus and Peter had to finish a report for Ancient Runes so I decided to indulge my anti-social tendencies. I walked up to our room hoping to get some homework done aka eat the stale doughnuts under Peter’s bed and take a nap.

             The stairs were on the fritz so it took me a good fifteen minutes of shifting to get to our room. Once I had demolished the three-week-old-grunge-doughnuts I pulled off my robe and climbed into bed. This was happening increasingly often, sitting in this room alone watching the wrinkles in my skin deepen; though last time something positively brilliant came out of it. Who knew that history would repeat itself?

                                                                                              _______________

            After my nap I spun around to look at the wall. The crackly white was soothing because if my eyes unfocused I could see words and pictures. When I couldn’t sleep I was always staring at them. Remus noted that I had unbelievable patience which he had come to appreciate.  Something broke the white. I let my eyes fizz back into focus only to notice a series of tiny black lines. 

            Written on the wall (yes, etched directly into the paint) was this note:

_Meet me by the lake at six._

_-L_

            My heart skipped a beat. Fuck that, it skipped two dozen beats as I ingested that note. I pictured her writing it, giggling and biting her lower lip. Something about it didn’t make sense. When had she come, and why? Did anyone see her, did anyone see this?      

            I checked the nearest clock. It read 5:58. Without hesitation I grabbed my jacket, sniffed my own breath and left. Once again it was a messy standstill. There was a smushed doughnut box on my bed, wrinkled sheets and a comforter trailing the floor. My robe hung unevenly on a bedpost and crumbs scattered everywhere. I couldn’t care less. I hardly had time to think because I had to meet “L” by the lake at six. I was late and she was waiting. I felt a surge of adrenaline, a beating in my blood. Guess I hadn’t needed that coffee after all. 

                                                                                      _______________

                The stairs were still screwy so I bounced on the balls of my feet as jitters swam through my body. I tapped my foot and clapped my hands and silently willed the steps to _hurry up already._

                I was whipped out into the warm air. It was spring. Full on flower-blooming-warm-air-dewy-dreamy spring. It was dusk and one of the warmest nights yet. I jogged the distance to the lake with heavy breath. It felt like I was wading through a balmy cream; something that could moisturize my skin and make me a new person. 

                I reached the lake under a navy-tinted sky that grew darker by the second. She had left. Fuck. I was too late and she was gone. I turned in circles looking across the lake and through it searching for some sign that she had been here. There must have been evidence, footsteps maybe. And then, what if she hadn’t come at all?

               Standing over my reflection rubbing my face in my hands I heard laughter. It was a dainty laughter all coated in lace and breath. I was going mad. Hearing laughter, imagining notes on my walls. I was becoming schizophrenic wasn’t I? It was only a matter of time. 

               The laughter came again, swaying in streams from somewhere. It was a person after all. “Lily?” I called out, scouring every inch of the horizon. “Lily, is that you?”

              “Yes.”

              “What?

              “Yes, it’s Lily you goof.”

              “Where are you?”

              The laughter bounced against my ear. “Look up.” I looked up. Sitting in the tree was a bare-footed Lily Evans wearing a very short tye-dye dress and holding a metal pan of some sort, Cheshire Cat Style. I should have known. That tree was famous. It had those spacious branches perfect for studying or kissing. During the warmer months it was always crowded with two or three student doing god know what. 

               “You’re late.” She said with a friendly smile

               “I’m sorry.”

               “I forgive you.” Her bare legs dangled off the branch. God, it was a tiny dress. The neck line hung low and the material only reached the middle of her thigh with fringes along the end.

               “What’s in the pan?”

               “Cake.”

               “Lovely. Snag it from the kitchens?”

               “Nope, I made it.”

               “You made it?”

               “Yes sir.”

               “What flavor?”

               “Pink.”

               “It’s pink-flavored…”

               “Yes, yes it is.”

                                                                                               _______________

               “You uh, you look really pretty.” She giggled, I was such a boy.

               “Thanks. It was pretty funny to watch you out there. I would’ve thought you could see my freckles from a mile away.”

               “Oh, um, I wasn’t expecting you to be, you know, in a tree. But it’s true; you’re not really the miss-able type.”

              “Read hair, green eyes, freckles galore. My gift and my curse.”  

              “It’s good though, unique and all. Those freckles are like little spots of joy, or polka-dots or something.” 

              “Huh, so I’m polka-dotted.”

              “Better than being striped.” 

              “Yes, definitely. Oh, imagine being checkered!”

              I shook my head. “Just terrible. Really, who doesn’t want _polka-dots_?”

             “I could name a few people off hand.”

             “Just think about all the wonderful things that are polka-dotted.”

             “Like?”

            “Let’s see, eggs. Well they are speckled, but close enough.”

            She looked enthusiastic. “Cheetahs, cheetahs are polka-dotted.”

            “Oh, butterflies…”

             “Good one.”

             “Merci.”

             “Fabric, duh.”

             “Costume clowns and dalmations.”

            “Lizards. Like the Gila Monster and eastern collard lizards and blue-tailed monitors.”

            “You sure know your lizards now don’t you.”

            “I read a book on them once.”

            “Do you retain all the information you read, James Potter?”

            “No, only the very important things like, you know, lizard species.” She laughed.

            “Naturally.”

            “It’s a skill.”

            “A very useful one as I can see.”

            “Ah, yes. I should put it on my resume shouldn’t I.”

            “What other things are you well-versed on?”

            “Let’s see, mountain names and candy contents and all things Quidditch, of course. Quotes and Beatles’ lyrics. Pie-tasting, lycanthropy, sock-matching, book-reading, people-reading too. Also spells and potions, thank-you Hogwarts.”

            “That’s quite a list.”

            “Impressive, huh.”

            “Yeah. I mean, if it was true.” She wore a flirty smile.

            “Excuse me. Are you implying that I speak anything but the truth?”

            “I think I might be.”

            I licked my finger and held it in the air “Do I… Is that a challenge I hear?”

            “Oh, you’re on.”

            “Subject?”

            “Spells and potions.”

            “Damn.”

            “Charms specifically.”

            “Oh, lord have mercy. You played the charms card!”

            “It’s my specialty.”

            “Hit me with you’re best shot.”

            “What is the precise spell for turning an apple into a frog?”         

            “I know how to turn a frog into a prince,” I offered garnering only slightly disapproving looks. “Half-credit?”

            “Mmm, so you were lying.”

            “Umm, Expelliarius Tunamune”

            “Did you just make that up?”

            “Pretty much.”

            “The clock is ticking James”

            “And tocking.”

            “You have an answer?”

            “Um, oh god, my brain is turning to mush. I’m melting!”

            “What kind of mush?”

            “Oatmeal-ish, with a hint of cinnamon.”

            “How delicious of you.”

            “Oh god! I give up, you have left me defenseless and alone…. in a dark wood… surrounded by gnomes…”

            “That’s very specific.”

            “You’re a specific lady, no mundane punishment for me.”

            “I would at least give you my coat.”

            “You’re not wearing a coat.”

            “That’s a good point. I would give you my hypothetical coat then.”

            “Is it red?”

            “Sure.”

            “With a nice belt and big shoulder-blades”

            “Why not!”

            “We’re living crazy Lily Evans, right on the edge.”

            “Who knows, next we’ll be sitting in a tree at sunset eating pink-cake and making lists of polka-dotted things. Oh wait, WE ALREADY ARE.”

            “Pretty outrageous. We should write a book about it, a song at least.”

            “What will we call it?”

            “Hmm, we’ll call it ‘ _The Twilight Cake Affair_ ’ and then the Beatles will do a cover and we’ll be rich and famous eating grapes out of someone’s hand.”

            “Nice title.”

            “Catchy, right.”

            “I would expect nothing less. What will we do with all the money?”

            “Buy all things polka-dotted.”

            “All things freckled, you mean.”

            “But of course.” We silenced for the first time.

            “You ever wonder where they lead to?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Like maybe they are a secret treasure map or they spell out a name or something.”

            “Well we should find out now shouldn’t we?”

            “It’s our duty.” We sat with a quill and ink connecting her freckles into pictures of hearts and brooms and lop-sided smiles. Her arms looked like a black mass, an exotic tattoo. “I say, you look groovy beyond a doubt.”

            “I must agree.”

            “So have we gathered any new information about your life and or soul.”

            “No. Wait, yes!”

            “What?”

            “My polka-dots can be connected.”

            “Quite the scientist.”

            “Hey, with your knowledge of lizards and my excellent deductive skills we could become a scientist super-duo.”

            “Like Madame Curie and her boy toy, except much younger and more fashionable.”

            “With more cake.”

            “And polka-dots.”

            We sat in silence for the next while watching the sun drop lower into the pink and red sky. I had never been so happy in my life. The feeling ripped shreds from my mouth. I never, ever wanted to leave.

                                                                                               _______________

            My day had been a string of vignettes; little unconnected happenings and funny stories. There was the blue sky, Sirius’s cursing in German, the bets, the coffee, the note. They formed a swirling mound that should have connected, but didn’t. My day had been choppy and blocked-off. It was snippets of conversation and words written on walls, confession tracing the sky. The meanings were there but I was blind to them. 

            The only thing I understood was her. All I knew was Lily. All I could think about was that rosy cake and the way she rested her head on my shoulder as we watched the sky fade from blue to pink to black. How pretty she was with her little dress under the dark spring-time sky. It was enough to keep me blissful for years.

**“But, when the Rabbit actually _took a watch out of its waistcoat pocket_ , and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a Rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. **

**In another moment down Alice went after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”**

**-Lewis Carroll**

**______________**

**A/N** : This chapter is lighter, as warm and silly as their spring-time air. It's been more than a month since I updated mainly becuase I wrote the chapter, then re-wrote the chapter, then changed the dialogue and blah blah blah. Anywho, I'm back. It's my spring break, thus I have finished "On Writing" by Stephen King and consumed more sushi than any sane person should. It's so warm and lovely outside that I find myself lolling on our big stone porch and taking pictures of everything. I hope you all are doing well, and I hope you enjoy the chapter. Do tell me what you think :)

                                                                          

 


	7. Palm Tree Encounters

**_ Chapter 7_ : Palm Tree Encounters **

                                                                                       “Loneliness is the human condition.”

                                                                                                    -White Oleander

            I was learning more and more about Lily Evans simply by knowing her. It was surprising how many things I missed. I watched her with single-mindedness, a close scope that missed all the obvious. I could recite her features, memorize her eyes and find my way across her wardrobe in the dark. I knew the shape and texture of her fingernails but I didn’t know a thing about her schoolwork, her friends.I tried, in vain, for the next little while to understand her because I couldn’t, because I was lonely and I hardly understood how love and friendship worked these days. 

            I learned that she ate the same breakfast every morning (dewy eggs, two pieces of bacon and a gushy, gooey blueberry muffin). I learned that she loved fringes and _rock n’ roll_ ; cats, colors, mood rings. She laughed from her diaphragm and collected ribbons and played an integral role in the third year bubble fight. 

              _I am thirteen. Sirius, Peter and I are sitting on the front lawn. Remus is sprawled out somewhere on a hospital bed with gashes acrosshis arms and legs; bloodshot eyes and a guilty stare. It is an unthinkably hot day in the beginning of June, back when we were younger, back when we were innocent.  Sirius’s hair is shorter. In later years it grew darker and wavier, his face thinned and his eyes sliced. Sometime around fifth year he began to look dangerous._

_The heat is heavy; it pulls us down and makes us sag. We are sitting in the sun, melting and contracting in unison. We are all talking about something; I can’t quite remember what, something fleeting and juvenile. I turn around to see Lily Evans’ pumpkin-colored hair flip around. A boy pours a bucket of water down her back. She screams and leans back, wearing little shorts and a tank top. She is running, fast and agile, and soon her friends are all dots swimming through the grass. They are drenched and laughing 200 feet off. The wands erupt into lines of brown and bubbles shoot everywhere; ripe glassy bubbles that cannot pop._

_It looks like a dream. There are beautiful clear-skinned children twirling and swaying with bubbles in between their fingers and all across the sky._

_She was always popular, surrounded by handsome, rich wizards to be. “Pretty boys,” Sirius scoffs, though he isn’t one to talk. Some odd minutes later the bubble fight is split apart. Nine students are sent giggling and thrilled to a detention._

The bubble fight was talked about often. It became an urban ledged that I inadvertently witnessed, that took far too long to forget. It was so rebellious and fantastical, soapy orbs dancing through the Hogwarts landscape. Occasionally, I see her as I did then, with soft bubbles parting her hair and adorning her wrists. It wasn’t my first memory of her but for a long time it was my most vivid. Long before I knew her she a shimmery hologram dancing through the grass. She was different now, she was real. 

________________

             My scope of her was changing swiftly and deftly. Every time we spoke she changed; she became more real and simultaneously more bewildering. Each time I found a new reincarnation. There was the red-eyed exotic mess I saw from afar falling down and breaking up with boyfriends in conspiratorial tones. There was the hazy, finger stained Lily that sat on my bed and blew me into the darkness. Then, there was the slightly demystified Lily Evans hanging above me in a sunset tree eating pink cake and talking pretty. 

            Every girl seemed strange and wild with abandon but hardly a single being. As I got to know her she distorted farther and farther. Somehow under the light of the sky and the crisp of the walls she became an abstract being; a memory, a wisp. How could I get to know someone who never stopped changing? How was I supposed to make a connection when no one could stand still long enough for me to try? I had to find a way to know her, I had to find some loophole in.

            It was then that those empty, nameless friends of hers returned to me. In my mind they were spoiled, shallow shapes of people who made her, and indirectly me, miserable. Most of them were flimsy faux-friends that faded fast.Most would slowly but surely disappear, but not all. 

                                                                                                         ______________

            From what I gleaned Lily had two best friends, Audrey Harwood and Silas Montgomery. Audrey had thick, curly hair consisting of equal parts chocolate and caramel which she loving referred to as “biracial”. Audrey was tall and slender and looked slightly waifish, like a model masquerading as a book worm. When she stood she leaned inward slightly, like she was constantly posing. Audrey was friendly and sarcastic, she never wore a bra. She liked to write and drink coffee and roam the halls. Her eyes were droopy and something about her was almost ghost-like. 

            The first I ever knew of her was in fourth year when, at the tender age of fourteen, she was caught by professor Heely mainlining coke in the girl’s bathroom. She quickly gained a reputation. She was known for drugs and her willowy figure; a blatant disregard for the rules. She sported trippy print dresses to class instead of dreary black robes, she partnered with the geeky boys in class and drunkenly flashed the Gryffindor common room on various occasions. She was funny and outrageous and she had this flair I couldn’t help but admire. 

           Silas was quirky. He had feathery brown hair and that floppy, stupid grin always slathered on his face. He was happy and honest and he looked constantly smashed. He would come up behind you and just start laughing, spreading his grin and making cheeky comments on whatever you were doing. He aspired to be a mix of Fred astride and Holden Caulfield. He was a joker, a prick, a boy toy best friend I would never really escape. 

            They formed an infamous threesome. I saw Audrey and Silas sitting on the big stones in the courtyard smoking and gossiping for what seemed like hours. I saw Lily and Audrey walking down the hall giggling with their arms linked. I saw the three of them at the breakfast table in the morning, Audrey’s eyes droopy, Lily eating quietly and Silas bopping his head to a fictional beat. I saw them together and apart always causing a commotion. They were the friends who I would someday-soon come to know as people as opposed to faces singed under a hot, arid sky.

                                                                                                      ________________

             Near the end of April I saw Audrey and Silas sitting on the front steps. “Potterboy, come here, eh.” I walked toward them slowly, smoothing my hair and shielding the sun from my eyes. 

            “Hey.”

            “Good quidditch game man, you’ve got talent, you’ve got spirit!” Silas said enthusiastically. Audrey picked a piece of lint off her dress and rolled her eyes. 

            “Thanks.” 

            “You probably get that a lot don’t you,” He continued, grinning madly. “I mean, being a big sports star and all.”

            “No, not really. People aren’t usually so passionate about quidditch.”

            “Well count me out of that lot. I’m in it to win it. We’re you number one fans.” He looked over at Audrey and elbowed her animatedly “Isn’t that right?”

            “Sure thing, I’m a quidditch whore all the way.” Her voice laced with sarcasm, her lips curled up.

           “That you are. We’ll come to the next game all decked out with face paint and class colors, bringing signs of all sorts. Audge will even flash you if you want, lord knows she does it enough.”

           “Fuck you.” Her hands firm on her hips.  

           “Or maybe we should have Lily do that, be more your style, eh? You want a little Evans peep show?”

           “Excuse me?” 

           “Hey man, wait till game day. You’ve got a surprise coming your way.” I walked away to the sound of their laughter, to a hushed Audrey calling him an asshole, to a sinking feeling clawing at my stomach. 

                                                                                                     ________________

            By May something was fast approaching; summer was skorch and sin,  sleeping till noon and that quiet lull. Spring came first, dappled in lace and heat and long days outside. With the heat came an encounter with Audrey. She was sitting in the courtyard with the lawn polka dotted in rocks and carpeted in yellow grass. Students were scattered everywhere, smiling and laying lazy on account of the sun. She sat under twin boulders shaded by a ring of trees. I never knew what type they were, those long stalks of green and brown. They were tall and thin and didn’t bear the winkles and fat trunk that comes with age; that most of the trees on the grounds bore proudly. These trees hung at an angle with big leaves like lotus petals. They looked like palm trees, or some exotic sloping plant. They made me think of Hawaii and how we were all going crazy. All my friends, all my classmates-the whole goddamn world was going crazy. 

            I thought about the way we all walk around empty and silent, flirting with human interaction. What happened to love and heartbreak, did my feelings crack and spill? Did they leak out into the spring time sun or desert me a long time ago, back when things seemed normal. Talk was pointless and irrelevant; it was empty chatter that filled the days. That’s all I was living on, chatter and sleep and inky pictures drawn in the notebooks beside my bed. My pictures were of wands and hair and fields; Lily’s red eyes still sprang up in clumps.

             I walked up to Audrey with my hands behind my back swaying on the tips of my feet like I was drunk. I sat on the boulder next to her and dropped my bag with a goofy smile. Audrey’s arm was covered in doodles and words. It instantly conjured images of Lily’s connect-the freckles experiment; how the whole week after she came to class with graying lines on her arms. 

             “Hi.” I say looking right at her. 

             “Hi.” She’s drinking a Pepsi. “So, you’re James Potter.”

             “I am indeed.”

             “Look Quidditch boy I’m not stupid.” 

             “Excuse me?”

             “You seem like a nice kid, you do, but you better not mess with her.”

             “With who?”

             “You don’t know her like I do, you’re going to end up doing something stupid. Just move on, have a cigarette, get a girlfriend, do you’re homework every once in a while. Just get over it.” 

             “What are you talking about?”

            “Don’t mess with her.” She stood up and walked away. She went leisurely, as if she didn’t just say what she did. I thought about her words, about ‘Don’t mess with her’ and how I didn’t know whether the warning was for Lily’s sake or for mine. 

                                                                                                ______________

I couldn’t understand the talk with Audrey. It was too much, too fast. All I could think about was the yellow carpet grass, _nice kid_ , doodled arms, the nameless trees. It was bizarre. I had no idea whether she was angry or bored, warning or advising, lying or being all too honest. 

“What the fuck?” I said to Sirius, lying on my bed looking up at the ceiling.

“Yes?” He was rummaging through drawers and walking across the room, looking for something. 

“People.”

“Yes, what about them?”

“I don’t like them.”

“Which people?”

“All people.”

“Oh. Any particular reason?” He sounded distracted. 

“What are you looking for?” 

“No, nothing.” He continued to scan the room. “But amen to that.”

“To what?”

“The thing about people. I failed my Astronomy test.”

“I thought she wanted to ‘shag you senseless’.”

“She does but she’s practically eighty and I’m terrible at Astronomy.”

“Oh.”

“What’s her first name again?” 

“I don’t know. Probably something like Muriel.” I pictured Sirius leaning over “Muriel’s” desk telling her that her blouse looked very nice. He tried to flirt with the female teachers to raise his grades and though it never seemed to work he always kept at it. 

“Do you want some help?” I sat up.

“With what?”

“I don’t know, whatever you’re looking for.”

“I’m not looking for anything.”

“Alright.”

“I’m sorry about people though.”

“Yeah, me too.”

                                                                                                    _______________

I saw Lily the next day and she asked if I wanted to sit outside with her and talk. She was wearing all white and her eyeliner was smudged. I wondered if she still had it on from the night before. 

She looked at me for a long time and started laughing. “What?”

“No, nothing. It’s just… nevermind.”

“You know Lily I don’t think I get anything anymore.”

“Audrey told me she talked to you.” I felt myself get nervous. What did she say? Did she tell Lily about the ‘Don’t mess with her’? Did she call me a _nice kid_?

“She did?”

“Yeah but I wouldn’t worry about it. She can be a bitch sometimes.”

“Wait, what did she tell you?”

“Not much, just said that you seemed like a nice kid and that she thought you were drunk.”

“Oh. I wasn’t.”

“Ok.”

“It was a Wednesday afternoon.”

“I’m not judging.”

“I wasn’t drunk.” She was sitting on the ground Indian style making a crown of daisies. There was a small stain on her white shirt and I couldn’t tell whether it was green or brown. 

“Do want this?” She held out the dandelion ring, a pattern of fuzzy yellow dots and long green stems.

“Sure.”

“Don’t throw it out.” She said.

“I won’t.”

“Good.” She stood up. “See you James Potter.”

“Yeah, see you.”

                                                                                                    ______________

My loneliness was setting in. I began to think that human interaction was only a myth, that life was simply a series of stops in which I came close to knowing people but never really did. We all floated around like ghosts, flimsy and wailing- unable to speak.

All my friends were going their separate ways, growing into boys and men that I hardly knew. When had I let myself lose touch? When did friendship and sincerity begin to seem foreign?

I began to question things, constantly. I tried to answer and define, simply state and discover, categorize each of my friendships and feelings and failures. It was a lifetime of “F’s”. F for failing and fuck and frequency. F for fussy, for foreign, for forgetful. I felt like I had lines drawn all over me, invisible ink stains tattooing my arm with a battery of questions and a long list of names, the names of the people who I’d let slip through the cracks. I grew lonely and distant. I asked god questions and prayed for forgiveness. All I wanted was a little talk, a smile, a feeling that wasn’t this wishy-washy ambivalence **.** I delved into a life of nihilism. I was detached and deluded. I was still lost and dreaming of glaciers, of worlds far away, and a life different from my own. I spun by my classmates in a blur, wearing mismatching colors and blinking too much, too fast. 

No one really noticed though, that I had lost touch. No one cared because they were too wrapped up in their own lives, too hurt by my secrets and skeptical of my lies. I was getting sick of it, getting sick of over-thinking things and waiting to be discovered. I thought long and hard about Lily, about her freckles and thin wrists. I worried for Sirius, hoped for peter, longed for Remus. I ached for talks and honesty, for a seventh year that wasn’t so fucking depressing. 

Maybe if this wasn’t unrequited love, if Remus hadn’t been sick for so long, if life was just normal. Maybe then my lonely feelings would melt away with the rest of the winter, move on and let me feel human again. Maybe if I confessed something to someone and kept sketching, things would get better. Most days I sat in class bleary eyed, watching a watery room. I would catch red, stop on the freckles and the tiny frame. She would smile and turn, smack away at gum and tap her pencil—even look my way once in a while. Those were the only moments that I felt alive, that I felt hopeful for love and lust intertwined and the healing of broken hearts **.** I felt hopeful that her glances held something and that human connection wasn’t a lie, that it was standing smack in front of me batting its eyelashes and smoothing its skirt.

                                                                                                        _____________

**Author’s Note** : So, hey guys! I am officially back from my (unintentional) year long hiatus. It started out with a lazy day, I’ll start chapter seven _tomorrow_. Tomorrow inevitably turned into next week which grew into next month which flowered into a two weeks  and four days shy of a year without posting. All I ask of you guys is to give me a little time to get back into my groove. It will take a few chapters before I am where I was last April, with both my writing and comfort with the story. It may take one or two chapters and it may take another six before it becomes natural again, before the chapters begin to write themselves. 

Over the summer my computer crashed and I lost everything, all my drafts and notes and plans for the story. Combine that with ten months of forgetfulness and Amaranthine is feeling pretty fuzzy.  BUT, this is my baby and you all have been so endlessly amazing. I put this story out there seriously thinking that I’d be lucky with two or three reviews and here I am with 73 beautiful reviews, having been read and encouraged by some of my favorite authors, and spotlighted on this, lovely and oh-so-modern website. [Love the radnom quote thing, pictures on the profile, hourglass awards!] Thank you so much to everyone who has reviewed and read and supported me. I love you all and I am eager to hear what you think of chapter seven! 

**P.S.** I already have parts of the next three chapters done. I need to add some connective tissue, edit and polish, but things are looking up (what with my spring-induced mania and an 11 day long break starting tomorrow). About four or five more chapters and we will be into seventh year, THANK THE LORD. Remember that trustworthy and frequent updater you all knew last Spring? The strange one that disappeared for nearly a year and is brimming with posts? Well, shes back!


	8. Thirty Days to Bliss

_   Chapter 8_ :  **Thirty** **Days to Bliss**

                Every bit of the winter died away. The coldness in the air dwindled from arctic to chilly to mild. The wind dulled from a roar to a light breeze. The clouds went from heavy and burdened to low and thin and somehow smiling. The physical world around me was changing for the better. While sunny days elicited a smile or two from me they brought little else. Yes, the sun was out. Yes, I could walk outside and smoke my cigarettes without blue hands and a chattering jaw. Yes, things were better now that winter wasn’t biting me. But no, no I was not happy yet and I wasn’t sure why.

                I started to make lists. I made lists of why I was so unhappy, what exactly was wrong with the world, why I was beginning to cry sometimes in the shower. I named them, I listed my points and crumpled them into balls which I shoved into my pockets and behind my bed. The lists helped me formulate my thoughts on the ills of existence and the terrible way I dealt with and thought about and felt things (generally the horrible way I ingested the world). These lists seemed to show me in a very obscure way that I was not only helpless but truly doomed.

                **_Why Today Was Bad_**

                I woke up late, missed class.

                Spilled blue things from a cauldron, dirtied my shirt.

                Saw a film in class (muggle, shaky) of children smiling. Left the room. Nearly vomited in the toilet because of it.

                I finished my pack of cigarettes today.

                I am cutting the rest of school to replenish them.

                The clouds formed a crucifix around lunch time. I’m sure of it.

                Lily’s was wringing her hands all through class. She looked worried.

                If I kill myself the whole school will know about it. I will shame my family

And they will probably lock me in a casket instead of churning me to ash as I wish.

                The chicken at dinner was over-cooked.

                To any outsider this list would seem petty. All of them seemed a mix of ridiculous, inconsequential things and wide, unfathomable sadnesses of the world.  Children smiling and laughing made me physically sick to my stomach, forced me leave the room and nearly retch. Even the good things were bad. For this, I was utterly doomed.

                                                                                                                _________________

                According to those around me my eyes had sunken in, I constantly reeked of harsh chemicals, I walked too slow and I looked vaguely blue. When I looked in the mirror I did not see these things--sunken face, cobalt tint. Instead, I saw myself retching over the toilet at the image of children laughing. I saw myself in the same pants and same shirt for what appeared to be weeks. I saw myself writing the wrong date on all my papers, never bothering to change it.

                I thought it might be a good time to die. Everyone around me (that is the people in my immediate room and those that walked up to me with tilted heads and bulging eyes and asked in whispers ‘What’s wrong with you James?’) seemed either confused about existence or rightfully miserable as well. Teachers held my gaze for a moment too long, adults shook their head as I passed. It was far too much attention for me. I just wanted to quietly fade from my present blue to a transparent white so that no one could see me and eventually I would slip into death unnoticed. What was wrong? Everything was wrong. I was wrong. The world was sad, even in the sunshine, and my sunken eyes and blue-ish tint was the very least of it.

                                                                                                                _________________

                I was attending school rarely. Often I would bulk up on tobacco (I had taken to ripping off the filters on each cigarette leaving little white bits in my wake). Sometimes I sat in my room and read Sirius’s books. I came to love the little notes he wrote in the corner, passages he underlined and comments about the character, the writing, the verb tense.  I felt like I was talking to him, as if he resided in the worn pages and chipped writing.

                When I did attend classes the looks and whispers increased two-fold. I would catch words of conversations like ‘ill’ and ‘that smell...’ and ‘really!?’ Teachers eyed me as if to say _what a shame_ and no one failed me that quarter though my work consisted of three assignments the whole semester (each with the wrong date).

                Lily walked up to me after I had been absent for a week. I had decided diligently to try to go to class again because life would probably be over shortly and the sun shone in my eyes when I tried to sleep through the morning. “Hi.”

                Startled I turned towards her in my low desk seat with an apparently perplexed look. I didn’t respond. I wouldn’t know what to say. She sat down next to me curling one leg over the other and winding her arms into a knot-like position. “I see you are in school today.”

                “Mhmm.” I nodded.

                “Bravo.” She was biting her lip and her arms were swaying in that strange knot-like pose.              

                “Thanks.”

                “So, are you ok and all?” She was looking right at me. “Your skin, it’s, well it’s sort of weird looking. Like white-ish, blue-ish and sort of veiny. You look like you’re sick. Are you sick?”

                I couldn’t help but laugh.

                “Maybe.”

                “Oh so you’re _maybe_ sick.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure that’s possible. In fact, it’s not.”

                 We were silent for a moment. “You cough a lot. Maybe you have bronchitis.”

                “I don’t think so.”

                “Ok.” She paused. “Will you have lunch with me?” She said very quickly, almost under her breath.

                 “What?”

                 She placed her arm on my forearm. “God, you’re cold.” I looked down at my blue arm with her small fingers on top of it and that look on her face, smiling eyes, worried lips. “So… James Potter will you have lunch with me today? You don’t have to eat if you don’t want to. I might want to. I’m hungry at the moment. I could go for something, a sandwich, some pie. I’m not sure…” She trailed off.

                  “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that.”

                  “Fabulous. Will you wear a sweater for me?” She cocked her head to the side, watching me very intently. This statement socked me in the gut. Just the way she said it, her high voice, the fast way she asked me things. _Will I wear a sweater for her_. Just those few words made me smile, left me goopy and momentarily happy. “You’re smiling!” She said excitedly.

                   Still grinning I nodded. “Yes,” I chuckled. “Yes Lily I will wear a sweater for you.”

                    “Great. Meet me in the courtyard.” She walked back to her table and half-way there yelled “Don’t forget!”

                                                                                                                 _________________

                     During class Lily kept sneaking looks at me. It was evident that she thought I wouldn’t notice but of course my lack of attention to academic things gave me wandering eyes, ones that often wandered to her. After potions was over and Lily parted for some other class I kept seeing her in my mind with her cocked head saying over and over again _‘will you wear a sweater for me?’._ I decided that love, or perhaps infatuation, was a bit like haunting. Someone’s eyes, earlobes, ankle bracelets and lilts seemed to follow you everywhere. Like a determined ghost phrases hung in your mind repeating themselves much more like a spirit sitting next to you than a memory or a thought.

                     Infatuation was filled with ghosts of all kind. Ghosts of regret, of passion, of pain, of worry and of remembrance. Some were lighter and transparent appearing just for a moment over your bed before you drifted to sleep. Others were dense and black like smog, thick memories that followed two steps behind you everywhere. There were wailing ghosts of adoration who sat atop your shoulder and whispered sweet nothings of your lover in your ear. Likewise there was the contrary of these angelic specters, screeching, overly-loud banshee types, that told you all the terrible things about yourself and about them, that it would never work anyway, to quit while you’re ahead.

                     That was it: I was haunted. In addition to my plague of inner problems, this weeping blue filter I placed on every situation and scenario and my inviolable depression I was _haunted_. And it wasn’t Lily that was doing haunting but strange and vivid reincarnations of her that planted themselves in my mind and followed me everywhere. On a film reel Lily’s words, the image of her eating breakfast, strutting the hallways, wearing a bun and shorts and giggling on my bed. These were the ghosts that haunted me--ghosts that I reached for and felt only empty air, ghosts I desperately wanted to trade in for the real her. A live thing, not refracted memories and incessantly repeated words. Mind you, to be haunted by Lily Evans was not the worst of fates.

                                                                                                                 _________________

                Two successful classes later (success deemed by presence not application or aptitude) I was standing in the courtyard smoking a cigarette. My hands were shaking. Despite the nonchalance with which Lily asked me this was a matter of great magnitude. The moments in which the phantom Lilys subsided and the real Lily (of flesh and legs and dresses) took their place was a rare and exciting time. I was always surprised by her. I was always reminded how little I really knew her.

                People passed, people in summer skirts, in requisite black robes, in smiles and concentrated conversation, mouths moving quickly. Two minutes passed, then five minutes, then ten. Again I was struck with the terror that perhaps she wasn’t coming. My insecurities often tied themselves in with guilt. I felt I had or might have done something wrong in which she would choose not to pity me with lunch but rather leave me dawdling in a courtyard with too much sun and talkative student body. I often felt that I had done something so wrong that no one would forgive me, that I acted so _______ (fill in the destructive adjective) that everyone had a totally different view on me, namely a negative and even hateful one. Many of my feelings and actions I found to be traced back to this abstract guilt that sprung up from somewhere and continued to bubble through me with or without origin.

                The tremor in my hand was growing more and more violent with each minute passed. Against a wall, leg up, cigarette darting from my lips and then to a dangling rest. Back and forth frantically: lips, rest, lips, rest. “Be careful James, no need to choke yourself.” Silas appeared next to me. “Or better yet, no need to do it at a time like this.” He grinned.

                “What are you talking about?”

                “I see you wore that sweater.” I glanced down at the navy cardigan I’d snatched from Sirius’s closet who was always a surprisingly sharp dresser. Also, due to recent weight loss his clothes fit me better than my own.

                Audrey (who I knew couldn’t be far from the presence of Silas or Lily alike) emerged from somewhere throwing her arms out theatrically “Blue as a navy sky spangled with stars, white as corpse risen from the dead, smoking his cigarette as if for sustenance. Ladies and gentlemen, James Potter, the poet of Hogwarts.”

                “How romantic!” Silas said in mocking female voices.

                Audrey stuck her chest out “His notoriety will only be increased with an impending suicide in which he will live forever as an emblem of unhappiness in youth and the romantic profundity of sticking one’s head in an oven or blowing one’s brains out with one final kablam.” She dipped into a low bow as Silas clapped emphatically. “Thank-you, thank-you.” She blew kisses to an imaginary crowd.

                “Jesus Christ.” I muttered.

                “Yes, just like him James. Martyr and demi-god! Perhaps we shall fashion you a cross as well to emulate your brethren. Tell me, are you a Christian?” Silas fashioned his closed fist into a microphone and stuck it in front of my face.

                Hands shaking even more violently I began to walk away from them into the direct sunlight and towards the opposite end of the courtyard. “Oh, but James. She is meeting you here. Just late for a moment.” Called Silas.

                “Attending to some business, freshening up for poet/Christ/dead-man-walking.” Audrey said with her lips peeled into what should have been a grin. “She sent us to make sure you don’t leave Quidditch Boy. Wouldn’t want to do a thing like that to her, now would you?” I was always perplexed by the depth of their cruelty, the suddenness with which they decided to torment me and the odd coyote-like way in which they sniffed out my insecurities and elevated them to new heights.

                In my head I reminded myself that they didn’t matter, that they simply enjoyed being evil and that I would stay just where I was, shaking hands or not. I realized quickly that what bothered me about these random in-depth attacks was not them in and of themselves (I had developed a thick skin out of my cynicism and people rarely penetrated it unless I let them) but the fact that it lead me to wonder if perhaps Lily was more like them than I believed. They were her best friends after all.

                I walked back to the wall, lifted my leg to the precise angle it was before I’d moved and continued my rapid inhaling and then rest all over again. Audrey walked up to me in her second persona, the one I feared much more than the first: flirtatious. She did her usual saunter towards me and pulled her face near mine (I did my best to remain still as stone staring forward defiantly and smoking my cigarette at that rapid pace) “You look _awful_ dapper Mr. Potter.” Her breath on my cheek.

                “God Audrey, why don’t you just lick the boy.” Silas said in an afflicted tone. He seemed rather addicted to attention (particularly that of his two female best friends). Rumors had swirled for ages of vulgar threesomes and whole nights of coked out orgies. I took these with gulpfulls of salt.

                “Don’t get jealous Si [this was a nick name I had yet to hear]. You know whose bed I’ll end up in tonight.” She winked. I wasn’t sure whether this was a joke or not. There was thick sexual tension between the two but part of me thought it to be simply a part of their shtick. He called her a slut. She told him to keep it in his pants. They made vague insinuations of night-time debacles. There was something palpably incestuous about it though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

                “Lucious Malfoy? Thomas Rendein? _Sophie Lapp?”_

                “Fine, you want me to lick the boy? Here you go love.”

                As I stammered a quick “N-n-n…” And attempted to shift to the left, leaning as far from her as I could she grabbed my face in her hands (clutched too tightly I may add) and licked from my chin to my temple in a fast, devouring manner.

                “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?” I screamed.

                “You slut.” Silas said quietly, bent over in laughter.

                “Look at that, my spittle is all along your face Quidditch Boy. How cute.”

                Angrily wiping the wetness from my face I felt myself overcome in anger. I hated to be touched, I hated Audrey and her cruel sexuality, Silas and his attention-hungry jokes, everyone and the way they looked at me, talked to me, passed me in classes in which I should have failed.

                I turned towards Audrey until she was up against the wall, a flicker of fear in his eyes. “Don’t ever, EVER touch me again. I don’t know why you two hate me. I don’t know why you insist on bothering me and tormenting me when I have done _nothing_ to you. You are a spiteful, vicious girl and I wish you would just leave me the FUCK. ALONE.” She cowered low below me. Silas stood behind us silently his face washed of any humor. Audrey was biting her lip in the same way Lily did.

                We were all silent for a moment. Audrey shook her self off and dipped down behind my arms to free herself from cowering at the wall. “Sheesh Quidditch Boy sahh-reey.”

                “Don’t call me Quidditch Boy.” My voice was low and menacing.

                “Oh god.” Said Silas.

                I turned to him now. “Do you want to make another joke about me killing myself? Do you think that’s funny? You think I’m going to kill myself. Is that what you think? Do you want me to laugh at all the _shit_ that’s wrong with you?”

                Silence. His face was stark white. “N-n-no. No.”

                After a few minutes passed in a horrid silence we ended up sitting on the ground in a ring of three. I hit my pack of cigarettes and pulled one out slowly, put it in my lips, lit it with a match. My hands were no longer shaking. I pulled out two more cigarettes and silently offered them to Silas and Audrey who remained in their stunned silence, faces agape and pale. They took the cigarettes tentatively and we sat smoking in silence on the grass by the wall watching the sunshine just a few feet away.

                                                                                                                 _________________

                I lay down on my back looking up at the clouds and the luminescent sapphire shade brought only with the spring time. Above my head from the opposite side I saw Lily’s face come into view, hair falling in front of her and just barely grazing my cheek.

                “Hi handsome.”

                Without moving I said “Hello Lily.” She lay down next to me. For a moment we watched the clouds shift imperceptibly. The world was moving, spinning and the only way we could see it was by the faint, barely noticeable movement of clouds swaying ever so lightly to the left (moving so slowly that we couldn’t even see it because the earth was the one moving not the sky).

                Without notice she slipped her hand in mine and said into my ear “Do you want to come talk with me?”

                I looked over at her. Her face was placid and smiling, her hair all over the place, a peek of her white stomach showing through her soft yellow shirt. “Yea, ok.”

                With her hand still linked in mine she pulled me up. She turned to Silas and Audrey who still looked vaguely shocked “Thanks for keeping him guys, you’re the best. I knew he’d leave if I didn’t have you guys come over because I always take _for_ ever. See you at dinner? Let’s have some of that green pie, ok? It’s so good. Let’s hide it so no one takes it.” She laughed. “See ya.”

                Her hand held firmly in mine she pulled me along behind her for a moment until I said “Stop.”

                “Mhmm?”               

                “I wouldn’t have.”

                “What?”

                “I wouldn’t have left.” Her eyes grew wide. She squeezed my hand tightly.

                “Really?”

                “I would have stayed. Even if you never came. I would have stayed and waited for you. I just, I would have. ”

                Smiling she grabbed our hands (tightly clutched together) and lifted them up, placed kisses on the skin of mine, the white-blue skin with veins and no semblance of heat or life. “You’re a sweetheart.”

                                                                                                                 _________________

                We walked to the end of a table in the dining hall (which was mostly empty by this time). She sat me down across from her so we sat facing each other in a somewhat uncomfortable, intimate way (which again made my hands shake nervously. She could surely feel the tremors.)

                “Thanks for wearing that sweater.”

                “Mhmm. May I ask why it was a mandatory?

                “It wasn’t mandatory. You just, you always look so cold and you feel like, like ice. Seriously, your skin is like a glacier, like you’ve been standing out in the snow too long without mittens.”

                “And?”

                “Well, you just look cold and I don’t want you to be cold anymore.” A tender look was in her eyes which she quickly shook off. “Plus, you look great in sweaters.”

                This made us both laugh in child-like coyness.

                As more and more students filtered out of the dining hall we sat still, facing each other, my hands still shaking slightly, her trying very obviously to wipe the tender look in her eyes away. Mind you, I recognized that this was worry or love or anything of the sort. Still, it was nice to know that Lily Evans cared about me, even from afar she saw me looking cold and instructed I wear a sweater, she sent her friends to come tell me she would be late. It was little things like this I remember about her.

                                                                                                                 _________________

                After various side-discussions about the ancient ruins lecture, the pudding the house elves hid in kitchens, the cost of wands these days and Sara Wellbys new hair cut (terrible verging on tragic) she looked at me very seriously and said “So, what’s wrong?”

                I felt the normal ‘nothing’ gurgle up in my mouth but I didn’t really want to continue my extensive lying streak. I didn't want to lie to Lily becuase she asked me to wear a sweater. No one I knew was like that, no one I knew seemed to care all that much. Also, she had a way of making me say things. I explained and revealed things to her that I would normally shield with my life. Perhaps it was because she appeared so relaxed about it, so nonchalant. Perhaps it really was that tender look in her eyes.

                “With me?”

                “Yes. What’s _wrong?”_

“I. Well, I… [I thought in my head, now how shall I phrase this without coming off suicidal or strange or mopey] I’m very unhappy at the moment.”

                “Why?”

                “For a lot of reasons.” It struck me that that was the first time I was talking about it out loud, my depression or unhappiness or whatever it may be. Of all the situations, to Lily Evans in an emptied dining hall.

                “Like what?” she said slowly.

                I laughed for a moment. “There’s so many of them. The winter, the state of humanity, how I barely speak to my friends any more. How I feel guilty about everything, how I feel like there is something so deeply and irrevocably wrong with me that I’m just doomed. My friend who’s sick. How I hardly smile anymore. How classes just seem so fucking dull and pointless and I don’t ever want to be there. How the teachers passed me though I’ve done no more than three assignments this whole semester. It’s like everything, me, the world, existence.”

                “I’m sorry.” I was glad she didn’t try to aimlessly reassure me. She didn’t tell me everything would be ok and nothing was wrong, she didn't sing along with the blind and joyful song so many people clung to. She just said she was sorry in that quiet way and I knew she really meant it and that was enough.

                “I suppose I simply feel like things are wrong and they will never get better. Something in my gut tells me that it will always be this way. ”

                “You do look a bit rough. You look a bit like the world is crushing down on you and no one is really lightening the load and I’m sorry about that. It’s like, when I look in your eyes I feel like you are carrying the whole world on your shoulders. That’s what you look like with your sunken eyeballs and pale skin. Like you have to carry the whole world.” She was staring at the window and speaking very quickly the way she did as she expained important things or asked me questions.

                I was surprised (but not all that much) at how effortlessly she put my feelings, just from the 'rough' look of me she understood.

                “So, I have a present for you.” This struck me as strange.

                “A present?”

                “Yes.” She said, grinning now.

                “What is your mum a psychotherapist and you’ve stole her meds to drug me up?”

                “Nono, absolutely not. Drugs are not the cure to your unhappiness.” Waving the thought away.

                “Wouldn’t it be wonderful is they were though?” I said almost wistfully.

                She reached into her purse. Her hand lingered inside shielding whatever it was that she had for me.

                “Ok, are you ready?”

                “Yes, I believe so.” I said with narrowed-eyes.

                She pulled out a large square wrapped in silver aluminum foil with a brown paper over it and a messy, nearly indistinguishable red bow. It was so badly wrapped that it was clear she had done it herself and most likely in a hurry.

                “Go ahead.”

                I slowly tore one edge. “Should I be afraid at all?”

                “No, nothing to fear. I promise.” She said watching the present intently.

                I tore the paper further and further forming a fault line then slowly pulled it open to reveal a thick segmented brown square.

                “It’s chocolate.” She informed me. “ _Dark_ chocolate.”

                “Chocolate?” I didn't even attempt to hide my confusion and slight disbelief.

                “Yes, sweetheart. This is your salvation.”

                “I know you love sweet things and all but somehow I doubt eating a pound of chocolate will soothe my ills. Particularly the deep-rooted psychological ones.”

                “It’s part of a program.”

                “Ok…” I said growing more and more hesitant the further she explained.

                “So are you up for a challenge.” She asked.

                “Sure?" How bad could it be? How bad could a plan centered solely on chocolate be?

                “So, here’s the thing. I’ve seen you looking so sad and heavy sort of, you’re only in class half the time and when you are you look like death and you’re always looking around the room and I’m looking at you looking at the room and it’s all a big mess. You don’t deserve to be unhappy. I don't think anyone does really. There is no reason you should be unhappy and cold all the time. None at all.”

                “Well thank you. That’s incredibly sweet of you to even think of me.”

                “You’re the sweet one.” She informed me. “So, anyway, I thought about it and I thought about it and this is what I came up with.”

                “Chocolate?” I asked.

                “Chocolate.” She nodded. “There are exactly 30 squares of premium dark chocolate here, go ahead, count them. Every day you are going to eat one of these square, no matter what. Every day you are going to have lunch with me, if that’s alright with you, and we’ will talk and sit outside in the sun sometimes and maybe have some of that green pie, it’s really very good. For thirty days you will eat this dark chocolate and have lunch with me and maybe wear more sweaters and try to smoke a wee bit less, you kind of smell like a chemical dump. For thirty whole days you will try to be happy and if you can’t try then just eat the chocolate and talk about it and be your sweet self and after thirty days exactly you are free to do what you please and smoke up a storm and wear thin shirts that barely cover your arms. But for thirty days we are going to try to cure you and make you a happy , somewhat sane person James. 30 days, that’s all. I swear. Is that alright with you?”

                “Um.”

                “Do you think I’m crazy or something? Perhaps I'm meddling. If I am feel free to call me a slag and tell me off or something.”

                I was silent for a moment. “I would never call you a slag.” I said very slowly.

                “Ok.”

                “This is just a bit unconventional.” In my mind I turned over the sum of the plan, chocolate, thirty days of lunch time, attempted cure (of something that was in my mind incurable). While I truly doubted that this method would solve or even impact my problems I decided that the means sounded rather pleasant and the fact that Lily gave me a hunk of chocolate larger than her and offered both counseling and her lunch time intrigued me very deeply. I was so curious and almost riveted that I announced in a very firm and certain voice “I guess it can't hurt.”

                “There you have it, thirty days to bliss.” She said.

A/N: Go ahead and be honest my lovelies. I will admit that I am not exactly in my writer's groove at the moment but something is better than nothing, right?


	9. Images Dissolving

_ Chapter Nine_ : Images Dissolving

            In the glare of Lily’s enthusiasm the plan had seemed a good idea. I thought it simple, feasible and perhaps even enticing. If God or Karma or whoever it was orchestrated things just right the outcome could include friendship, a cured disease or simply an innocent addiction to dark chocolate squares. Returning to the room after a painful attempt at ‘learning’ or at the very least ‘attending’ I found myself quietly hyperventilating in the space between the sheets.

            Sitting there in front of her as she pet her hair and glanced at windows I would believe anything she said. Despite my chemical odor and frequently referenced oceanic hue she still spoke to me. She still whispered and laughed in the same tone. She still crossed her legs and wore mesmerizing dresses. More than that she was intoxicating me with her closeness--the way she put her hand on mine and told me I was frigid, the way she called me sweetheart. It left me exposed and susceptible. Thus I listened to her and shared in the excitement. Chocolate! Talking! 30 days!

            It was only after a series of conversations with others and the settling blackness of night that the sheen wore off and a silent terror began to course though my veins. After awkward, stilted conversations with classmates about recent papers and the awful smell of the cauldron (it was not the cauldron) I remembered myself. I remembered that I was too quiet as of late and that talking to people was hard. I was metaphorically slapped in the face with the magnitude of spending thirty full lunches plus in the presence of Lily Evans. I would have to speak to her constantly and brush my hair and shower. She would try to make me eat things and talk about my pain and bring to life the problems I so vigorously fought to conceal.

            There was a bubbling, frantic feeling in me, one of utter and abject _nervousness_. Though at the time, breathing unsuccessfully in the dim light below the sheets, I would tie it to anything else (when would I smoke? She might lose interest. This will never work) I later recognized the adolescent simplicity of my fears. I was nervous to talk to a _girl_.

            In my own defense she was not any girl. She was the bending, giggling fast-spoken object of my adoration. She was an emblematic, beguiling thing that entered my life only through a series of fantastic coincidences. Her blushed cheeks and vivid crimson hair were all too much for me. Even watching her from afar (in the way I was so very used to) was titillating and exhausting. I felt tired and full after watching her eat dinner or lay languidly on the couch in the common room (limbs sprawled out, dramatic yawns).

            If I could simply watch her and walk away sleepy and grinning, satisfied by the mere images of her, speaking to her was a more foreign realm. It was in her speech that I began to feel over-whelmed. On the day we first met in the common room before the weeping, exploding flames (crying red, splintering into gold and orange and a faint edge of blue) one single sentence brought my heart crashing down. I remember the pumping blood, my blurry eyes. As she said ‘I really want to get messed up’ there was a glorious senses overload.

            Near to any aspect of her soul I felt both excited and depleted. First, her images (viewed from strange angles and considerable distance). Then, observing her interaction in class or whilst devouring ritual breakfast with her friends. After that point I began to go a little insane as my relationship with her miraculously _materialized_ into something half-real. The next realms were colored enigmatic ones whose memories I carefully inscribed in my mind. Her speaking to me or sitting next to me on the ground gazing at the stars in a lush blue sky.

            Spending time with her was a wild thing. Like an encounter with a feral animal (unexpected, slightly terrifying) I was responding on my tip toes with all the recording diligence of a scribe or a court appointed typist. I wanted to drain the words from her and bottle them into my own liquid potion. I would drink it until the end of time.

                                                                                              _________________

             Lily Evans was magnificent and thus far too much for me. It complicated further in that I was in a screwed up place. On my best behavior, on a _good_ day I was running to catch up with her (to not say the wrong thing, to not tell her I wanted to bottle her words). Now, in the dreary confusion resulting from manic months and conflicting emotions I was too lost to properly speak to my own best friends. How on earth could I handle a daily dose of her?

            I sat on my bed feeling the oxygen deplete and my hands turn very cold. I was unaccustomed to this toxic level of worry when it was related to something real. My feelings were all ambiguous and indirectly linked to a million things. I didn’t like the unapologetic directness of this feeling biting at my feet and stealing my air.

            Despite my worry of saying the wrong thing or failing to wear the navy blue sweater she liked so much I recognized a much graver problem. Through all these months I had absolutely refused to acknowledge the fact that I had an unnatural obsession with her. It was twisted and verging on perverted the way I watched her eat and talk and saunter, the way I obsessed about her ankles for hours and tried to perfectly reconstruct the brown dots in her eyes. I was sick with Evans Adoration.

            I was numb to her name because of the thousands of times I’d repeated in my thoughts and daydreams. I had a goddamn notebook wallpapered with what could only be described as her bloodied eyes. I was absolutely and unattractively (as well as very secretly) addicted to a girl I hardly knew. But I did know her, a fabricated and imagined version of her that sat on a swing in my wind and bucked back and forth, back and forth.

            I knew too much about her but also nothing. It was all so complicated and I decided, there on my bed, that I couldn’t get to know her. Not after all the strange details I’d collected on her and her friends. Not with a pre-emptive but very forceful feeling that I was in love with her. Not after watching her and trailing her and pouring over her words and movements, keeping a mental note of the dresses she owned and the various textures her hair could achieve. No, no.

            Another daunting thought hit me: she was the reason that I was depressed. She, through none of her own doing, had tortured me for months and unwittingly seduced me like a lace and guns vixen. She made me love her with her mere existence and the coyness of her never speaking to me because, quite logically, she didn’t _know_ me _._ How could I talk _to_ her about being love sick _because_ of her.

            Surely I could and would bullshit things and lie and drone on about my childhood and the strange complexes I’d developed from parental fallacies. But, oh, oh god eventually something would slip out or come off the wrong way. Somehow I would mention a dress she wore a month ago or notice her nail polish in an intrusive, demented way. I could begin to leak.  I could decide to tell her or even unconsciously mention hints that I loved her or thought she might be my soul mate.

            I could lie to her but I would hate it. I didn’t want to lie about anything. Suddenly I was struck with my own guilt. The depleting air and my childish dive into the tent of my blankets where no one could see me left not only nervousness but dense falling guilt, shame winding all around me. I had watched her. How sick it was. How sick it all was that for months I had loved her and never even known her. It was so unfair; this sweet girl had been defiled by my addiction. I was ashamed and guilty and terrified. The irony struck me that the girl who had absolutely unknowingly turned me into the contemplative up and down nicotine fiend who thought more than he ate was precisely the person who was there to save me from it.

            I would not tell her anything. I would stop the obsessions, the addiction, the fantasies. I would cut myself off cold turkey from my fake relationship with her and try my best to develop a real one. I would not mention the curve of her wrists or the Stringy He I watched her break in two. No, I would destroy the evidence and the memories. I would let it go and maybe be ok. Perhaps I would say nothing wrong and the thoughts would vanish. She was a girl, just a girl and I had no reason to be nervous, none at all.

                                                                                             _________________

            It took me over an hour to crawl out from beneath the sheets to find my three roommates sitting on their respective beds watching me silently, mouths agape.

            “Hello.” Sirius said pleasantly.

            “Oh, hello there…” I sat anxiously watching slight grins grow over their faces.

            “Having fun?” Asked Peter.

            “Yes, very.” I tried to regulate my breathing and return feeling to my hands and feet.

            “Have you, by any chance, been visited by Satan? Are you chums? Because you seemed to be having a mild fit there beneath your satin sheets.” Peter continued brightly.

            “They are cotton.” I amended meekly.

             I could hear Remus murmuring from the far end of the room “Awfully shiny for cotton.”

             “James Potter we all know you are mad sir, perhaps it was the drugs for which I take full to partial credit, but I didn’t know you had descended to fits in the night-time and cowering beneath your blankets. How very James Joyce of you. Tell me, was there a thunderstorm we missed?” Sirius was smiling as he said this.

             “Err…”

             Peter began mocking me “ _Errr ehhhm_ get on with it James and just tell us you were wanking and we’ll let it be, eh mate?”

            I swiftly weighed my options. Admit to the false but much more acceptable and masculine sin of self-pleasuring or try to explain in my gobby tangled words that it was not a fit or a visit from Satan but rather a panic attack about a girl none of you knew I’d even spoken to. Very, very slowly I drawled my answer “Yessssssssssss……”

            They all erupted into laughter, rolling on their sides and howling with glee. “Next time try to be a bit more incongruous mate.” Sirius said in-between hard shaking laughter. “We all do it but in _private_ in the _wash closet_ , very much _alone._ Capeshe?”

            “Mmmm, I’ll try.”

            “You need a snog or a shag or _something_. We can’t have this pre-sex offender behavior. Let’s be off the pub this weekend in search of the holy grail, a one night stand.” Peter announced. Then, chuckling he turned to me and said “James, you for one have no choice in the matter.”

                                                                                            ________________

            A few hours later after Remus and Peter had drifted into healthy, uncomplicated slumber Sirius and I remained awake, proving our sleep-impaired reputations.

            “You are a fool and a dunce.” He said laughingly.

            “Err, I know… Let’s move on from that point though.” Oh, how uncomfortable my life had become.

            “You’re right, much more of a madman I’d say. Don’t think I don’t notice.”

            “Eherrrm… Yes, I’m quite mad. In that same vein would you like to help me with something?”

            “Moral or michevious?”

            “The latter.”

            “ _Always.”_ His notorious glint had made its way to his eyes, sparkling even in the darkness. 

            A few moments later we were adorning ourselves with dark pulls and itchy hats that Peter’s mum had knitted us a Christmas or two back. With a hazy wink in the darkness Sirius grabbed a bottle of rum. I held my lighter up to the clock and saw shadowed floating hands near 4 o’clock. The early hour allowed for the type of ‘quiet’ in which there is a paradoxically elevated noise level. Joking and stumbling we made our way down the steps, past the common room and out of the castle onto a pitch black lawn.

            Sirius grabbed my arm to halt me and whispered “Where are we going?”

            “Somewhere.”

            “That’s awful vague.” His voice continued in a stage whisper.

            “It’s meant to be.”

            “Alright madman, lead me.” He said as he unscrewed the top of the rum and swigged it around causing his cheeks to puff out “like mouthwash...” He muttered and passed me the bottle.

                                                                                             ________________

            In the darkness of early morning and slowly intoxicating ourselves on rum we found our way (or should I say stumbled our way) to my clandestine spot in the forest where months ago I would wander to and watch ripples form in the pond.

            “Where on God’s bloody earth, err the bloody place… Madman!” He screamed. “Where have you brought me James?”

            “It’s the…” I was stumbling. “forest, a place forbidden. Hello forest!” I bellowed.

            “Why are you screaming!” He yelled with equal volume.

            “Why are you!”

            “It’s… dark…” He was laughing hysterically now. “And I am confused.” We both stagger with a laugh and find ourselves on the forest floor at half past four in the morning.

            “Jesus Christ James Christy Jeeesussss…. Susssss…”

            “That’s nonsense.” I say to him.

            “You’re nonsense.”

            “I’m aware.”

                                                                                             _________________

            Due to the murky sky and a small degree of stealth I brought my beloved notebook. Sirius was along, as he frequently was, solely for the ride. This was my last night of fixation and craving and mental trysts with my concocted Lily Evans. Tomorrow I would face her and my first day of talking, chocolate and legitimate understanding (not the dim-witted, low-light-bulbed version I had previously engaged in). I wanted to come with as clean a slate as possible. I wanted to let the past months, her red eyes, those thin wrists all blow into the wind and curl into flames. So that’s just what I did. 

            “Alright Madman-Potter, let’s get on with it. The sun is yawing and I am rather almost drunk.” Heavy emphasis on the k, slight swaying.

            “Don’t you mean _dawning._ The sun is more of a dawn-er than a yawn-er. Very few things yawn. People, dogs occasionally, Miss Laila.”

            “Yes, yes I meant a’yawn. No, dawn. Yes.”

            I pulled out my notebook abruptly and announced in a solemn voice “I need to burn things.”

            “Madddddmannnnn.” Sirius was chanting.

            I pulled him over to the spot Lily and I once drew in the mud, where her eyes were cast in the dried dirt. “Here.” He was wobbling all over and I had to steady him with my hands to get him standing both erect and still. “No, no. N-okay, yes. Yes, right here. Ok, stand, err, stay… Here. Good.”

            I stood next to him and ripped out 18 pages of notebook paper, sheets littered in her eyes or features, the winding rows of caves I had drawn for unclear reasons. I grabbed a chunk of dead leaves and placed them on the mud before us. I took a sip of the rum and shook myself. “Are you ready?” I asked him (fearing he may dip into the fire or fall asleep standing.)

            “Yes MadHatter [what my nickname had been distilled to in his drunken stupor]. Ready as I will ever be for whatever it is you dragged me here for. I kid, I brought the rum. There was no dragging!” He laughed to himself.

            “Alright.” Hesitantly I placed the 18 sheets of paper atop the dead dry leaves. I looked at Sirius, took another swig of the rum and bent down very gradually as to not fall.

            I cleared my voice and began my speech loudly [a speech for my benefit alone]. “I, James Potter, have been a fool and a madman. I have lived a strange life these past few months and I wish to dissolve my sins, my lies, my harmful hallucinations. Here lies 18 sheets of my notebook, 18 pages I wish to burn to ash and leave for good. To Sirius, my best mate who has accompanied me in the dead of the morning-”

            “With rum and high spirits.” He adds.

            “Yes, with rum and high spirits, I thank you and alternately apologize for my recent nicotine addiction and how it has seeped to you [he mumbles ‘that’s quite alright’] and all my odd behaviors. They stop now, today, with the flames.”

            “Hurrah!” He stumbles once again and I steady him.

            “Hurrah indeed. And, [I paused for a moment, then decided that Sirius was drunk enough to not remember this] to my fictional love, ankles and eyebrows and distances away I will always love you but sadly reality demands I set you aflame. Au Revoir.”

            “Au revoir! Gutenacht!” Sirius yells.

            I pull a metal lighter from my jeans pocket, hover it over the leaves and the papers for a moment, take a deep breath and flip it open to ignite the flames. Quickly, immediately the fire nashes into the paper spreading like a black disease. It eats the white until everything is aglow in orange. The heap melts smaller and smaller until after a few moments only a pile of black ash is left on the forest floor.

            With the sun rising delicately over the horizon (just a golden ebb in the distance) and Sirius watching with bewilderment I take my foot and stamp the ash into the ground, pat it down in a canyon and flip extra dirt over it. I pat the dirt with my foot, look at Sirius and down the rest of the rum.

            “The deed is done!” He shouts (we are both generally loud and boisterous drunks).

            “Finished and gone.”

            “Paper to flames to ash.” He reflects in a suddenly quieter and more sober sounding tone. “Alright mate?” Somehow, despite my attempts otherwise, he understands.

            “Yes, yes I suppose so.” I trail off. We stand for a moment and watch the sun pour over the horizon like a waterfall.

            “Ashes to ash, dust to dust.” He says as a last word before we toss the empty glass bottle and walk back to our rooms drunk and silent.

                                                                                            _______________

            I wake up to a blurry, slightly swirling world. “Fuck.”

            “Whatsamatter with you?” Peter says cocking his head to the side.

            “Errr, drink.”

            “Drink?!” He asks with disbelief. “It’s a goddamn Thursday morning.”

            “I’m Irish.” I offer.

            “Are you?”

            “No.”  

            Remus walks up to me like a curious kid in the zoo. He looks at me from different angles, shaking his head. “You know, I thought I heard something rustling or moving last night but then I decided it was a dream.” He hands both me and Sirius a glass of cold tap water. “I suppose not.”

            “You two are wretched hooligans.” Peter says trying very hard to hide the smirk on his face.

            Without warning Sirius yells from under his covers. “You’re a wretched sweet!” He still sounds drunk.

            “Am I now?” Peter looks far too amused.

            I muster a series of swear words and wobble to the bathroom. Everything is hazy and my mind feels somehow tight. The ground is swaying faintly and whenever I attempt to adjust to it the ground sways a little more. These are my hangovers.

            In the bathroom I look at my reflection for a solid 60 seconds. I am neither pleased nor disgusted. My hair is mussed and my eyes look a bloodshot yellow. Still, I look smoother, less ravaged. Perhaps Lily will remark that I don’t look as ‘heavy’ for that’s the way I feel, hangover or not.

            “Damn you James Madman Potter. You did this to me!” I hear Sirius screaming from behind the door.

            “You brought the rum dear Sir.”

            “Yes, that’s right. But I’m not an early morning pyromaniac!”

            “No, Sirius that you are not.”

            “Congratulations.” I hear Remus say.

            “Sod off.”

            Peter bangs on the door and says “Potter you are a fool and I am officially leaving you lot for a saner, less drunken lot.”

            “Remus isn’t drunk.” I note.

            “Remus isn’t a madman either, eh!” He laughs his way down the hall.

            After a few moments pass I emerge from the toilet smiling. “Are you two alright?” Remus asks unaware as to whether he should laugh or help us or simply leave the room.

            “You are too kind!” Sirius is still submerged in his covers. “Have I told you you’re my favorite?”

            “Many times.” Remus smiles.

            “Thank you sir we are fine though. Be on, we’ll catch up sometime around the middle of class.” I say with a pat on the back.

            He leaves the room smiling quietly. We listen to his footsteps pad away before either of us says a word.

                                                                                             _________________

           

            I straighten my bed in a woozy half-hearted way. I drink more water from the faucet, bending uncomfortably to reach the stream. I see my notebook lying at the foot of the bed with the crumpled edges of torn paper still hiding in the binding.

            “Mate, I am still drunk and this is all your fault.” He pauses. “Plus mine.”

            We both burst into laughter.

            “I hadn’t noticed, thanks for the inform.”

            “Shall we talk about it or is last night cosigned to our drunken, poorly-functioned memories?”

            “That and future rum-fueled tellings, perhaps a novel of yours.”

            “Yes, yes. It _is_ best that way.” He pauses and with much difficulty lifts himself from the bed. “One question mate,”

            “Mhmm?”

            “Did you get your fill of flames and rum and inopportune morning adventures?”

            I can’t help but snicker. “For the moment, indeed.”

                                                                                             _________________

            We made it to class approximately half way through just as I predicted. Noticing the company our professor did little scolding but a disappointed shake of his head. “Potter, Black, sit down immediately. How many points from Gryffindor?”

            “None, Sir.” Sirius says cheerfully.

            “Ten points from Gryffindor.”

            “Why bother to ask, aschloch.” He mumbles to himself.           

            We sit directly behind Remus and Peter who are laughing in a horrid sort of way. “Could I get a quill Peter?”

            “I don’t know you two. I’m ashamed.” He is smirking as Remus passes back two mangled looking quills and lumpy ink.

            Sirius looks at Remus kindly “Thank you _favorite_.”

            Only then as I dip my quill in the ink for what must be the first time in weeks do I remember. Today, Lily, the chocolate. A tremor runs through me. Though last night was a necessary debacle I am still essentially a teenage boy afraid to talk to a girl. I am still worried about saying the wrong thing but I try my best to let it go and focus on the lecture, the glowing light fixtures, anything but lunch.

            “Your hand is shaking.” Sirius notes flatly.

            “Oh.”

            “Mate, I thought you set whatever this was aflame in the wee hours of the morning?”       

            “It must be the alcohol.”

            “No more drinking for you then. Until tomorrow at the pub that is.” He pauses to write some notes [messy and almost indecipherable due to his Blood Alcohol Content.] He lowers his voice as he asks “Is there anything else we need to burn?”

            “No, no it’s not that.”

            “Alright madman, just take a deep breath. Whatever it is can’t be as scary as you imagine. Remember that.”

                                                                                             _________________

            One class passes and then the next does. I find myself finally sober and somewhat alert in Potions, nervously tapping my foot as lunch is not only near but next. Sirius looks concerned and Remus keeps getting me glasses of water. I want to crawl inside something (blankets, a volcano, myself) and hide until a year or so goes by and it is seventh year and people are different and lunch has passed.

            I contemplate telling Sirius about Lily, everything. I decide against it because he is no longer drunk and I would have to stand by my words. I am curious as to how much he actually remembers. Despite his love of drink he is an intellectual and a reader. I presume he remembers quite a lot.

            We make some strange bubbling concoction the hue of violets. I daydream of gardens and thin-skinned mothers with dirt on their aprons and a trowel in their hands. I think of violets and try to remember their purpose (like lilies for death). I vaguely remember some Shakespeare quote about flowers. I liken Lily to Ophelia in my mind and then scold myself for it. Today is a new day. I hardly know her at all, much less to the point of transforming her into a tragic fictional heroine [particularly one with such a nasty end].

            The violet liquid bubbles. My feet are jangling all over the place. Remus keeps bringing me water. Mr. Heely meanders around the room with a strange lost look in his eyes. His glasses only intensify the mystic gaze. As he nears our table he comments “Fine looking potion boys. You’re looking a bit jittery Potter, everything alright?”

            I nod.

            “Glad to have you in class anyhow.” He ambles off to other tables with his blank glare.

            “He is a very nice man.” Remus remarks. “Sometimes when the moon approaches he slips me a cup of tea or a piece of chocolate and says ‘not looking well boy, have a hearty lunch’”. The word chocolate sends another tremor through my body, settling in my stomach in a very uncomfortable way as if it is somehow coming to represent the whole idea, the whole lily evans shebang.

            I suppose I always felt excited but somehow at ease with Lily because I felt the her in my mind was the real her, like I knew her anyway and this was just an extension of my thoughts. Only now was I facing the fact that I knew very little about her. I was heading to lunch (as well as thirty days of commitment) with a stranger. A stranger whose daydream-version and reddened eyes I lit on fire on a drunken morning with my best mate. My foot was shaking so hard the table absorbed a slight tremor.

                                                                                            ________________

            Class ended with the piercing scream of a bell. It took all I had in me not to set out in a run. I found it suddenly strange that the thing I had dreamt about and longed for month after month was now a reality that sent me into a nervous fit.

            “Want to have a smoke?” Sirius queried with a calm expression. He was gazing out the window at a sun-ripened day, bright green fields and a plush blue sky.

            I wanted to scream YES! THANK GOD! but was forced to respectfully decline on the grounds of slightly improved smell (I gargled vigorously with mouthwash and wore a mostly inoffensive men’s cologne) so as to appear neither a drunkard or cigarette junkie. Still, I forgot to brush my hair.

            I saw her in the hallways at some point yesterday. She yelled “Same place as before!” Stunned that she had acknowledged me in such a public way I walked on cheerfully.

            I had learned from past encounters not to let her lateness ruffle me. The hard part was attempting not to smoke in her absence. I clutched the lighter in my pocket and ran my fingers over the cold metal edges. I had a single piece of chocolate wrapped in a piece of paper in my other hand.

            My worry stemmed from anticipation, from the slight fear I might see Audrey or Silas, my lack of nicotine-induced tranquility and, deeper than that, of meeting the earthly Lily Evans. After a few minutes passed I sat down in the grass.

                                                                                             ________________

            I hear her before I see her. The dawdling, frail crunch of grass. I’m twisting a dandelion in my finger.  “Hello, hello.” She says brightly.

            “Hi Lily.” Trying to concentrate on the yellow fur of the dandelion. I’m afraid to look at her. I hear the grass crunch a bit more and feel her plop next to me, a sweet little sigh as she does so.

            “I’m sorry I was late. Things, you know, they, well they occur.” I look up to see her. First thought, she looks beautiful. In the sunlight I see the glint of her long curled hair. She is wearing a simple yellow dress with these diamond tear-drop earrings that catch the sun and diffract it. Second thought, her eyes look stifled.

            For a moment we sit breathing in the air tinted by the scent of grass. I look at her, her sleepy eyes, her naked freckled legs. For a moment I am tangled in the dandelion; we are silent. Her eyes probe me.       

            “You look better.” She notes. “Though your hair is mussed.” Without hesitation she reaches over and runs her slender fingertips against my scalp. She makes a line with her fingernail as what I suppose is a part and pats it to the side. She is giggling. “That’s better.”

            I pull the chocolate from my pocket with a torn piece of loose leaf wrapped around it. It sits there in the center of my palm for a moment. “I thought you should be present for the commencement.”

            “Ok.”

            I look at it. Everything seems to be moving slower, blurring not by alcohol but sunshine and the millions of freckles all over her devouring her arms and legs and placed delicately on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

            I take the single brown cube and unfold it from the paper, lift it to my mouth, place it square on my tongue and close my lips. I chew for a moment and feel the sweet, savory taste of cocoa slip down my throat.

            I become slowly aware that despite last night’s activities (and the deep profundity they seemed to represent in my mind) nothing much had changed. Lily was Lily and I was myself and we were locked in this silent thing, this wavelength and neither the smoldering sun nor lost pages of eyes seemed to change that.

            In silence she grabs my hand and pulls me from the brick wall. I am grateful because that spot reminds me of Audrey and Silas and all I want to do is forget them.

            Her hands are soft and warm. She pulls me through the grass to a tall, sloping tree on the far edge of the courtyard hidden meekly from the sun. She folds her legs below her and runs a finger through her hair. I sit down carefully, still in the halted blur of something, aware that today is the beginning.

           “This is a better spot. I like branches better than brick.” She relaxes palpably. Her eyes droop to their normal place, making her look sleepy. They still remind me of rotted moss.

           “Mmm.”

           “So, James Potter, what has been troubling you?” That easy. One sentence, not a glance or a shake. Just the one sentence was said and I was almost shocked at the ease of it.

          “Er, well. Lot’s of things trouble me. I trouble me, mostly. The world goes on fine and I just make my own problems. It’s a dreadful way to be.”

          “Don’t we all create our own problems?” Her legs are beneath her; the shadows from the leaves dapple across her face like scars.

          “No, I don’t think so. Some people are born into dysfunctional families or contract cancer or develop crippling schizophrenia.”

          “Yes but drug addicts, teenagers, those that have nothing to complain about. They concoct their problems, almost out of sport of something. _We_ concoct our own problems.”

           “I suppose most of us do. Life would be much too simple if we didn’t.”

                                                                                             _________________

            Lunch is half way through. She is eating an apple; the juice is drizzling all over her chin. After she chucks the contorted core behind her she pulls out a little navy blue notebook. “Shall we make a list of problems to attack?”

            “Err.” I have unconsciously been ripping up tiny plots of grass. Dirt and green stain my hands. “Well, you are _ze dokteur_.”

            “Am I?” She asks laughing.

            “I’m certainly not. We know that much.”

            She smiles at me in a sad way. “Just start talking and I’ll jot things down. Don’t censor your self. Feel free to whine and sob and say whatever you please.”          

            This makes me smile. “Alright…”

            “This year,” she starts as if to prod me.

            “Ok, sorry I feel a bit strange. Alright, this year I… I have troubled myself unnecessarily. I have allowed myself to get high on life and then drown into loneliness in a matter of days, like I’m alternating between the two. Sometime I lie to people and I feel guilty about that, little things though. Almost everything I say if sort of a lie. When I am talking about potions or history or papers due I’m sort of lying because I don’t care about those things and I just want to go to bed.”

             She is scribbling furiously. Lily Evans is my shrink and I am vomiting my sadnesses, the strange truths I hide beneath my pillow most nights. It’s an odd scenario indeed. She doesn’t respond or add her own little anecdotes; she simply lets me talk on and on scribbling in the tiny notebook like a swatch of the night sky.

             “I just, I feel so fucking lonely sometimes. I feel like everything in the world is just very wrong and sometimes I’m at fault for the wrongness and sometimes it’s others and sometimes I just feel doomed because this is just the way it is, all flawed and wrong and changing but in dreadful ways. The only thing that makes me sadder than the state of the world and myself is happiness. Isn’t that strange?” She doesn’t respond. “Sometimes I’ll see people smiling or I laugh for a moment and then an instant later I feel as if I might throw up choke or something. It’s like even the happiness is hiding some darker truth.”

             She nods, as if to say _continue._ “I suppose it would take more than thirty days to list my grievances, much less attack them. I hate how selfish I am, how complicated and masochistic I can be. Like I think all these horrible thoughts and for what reason, what purpose? To make myself miserable. And then, in turn, make those around me miserable. I hate to do that, to be so glum that everyone notices and feels a bit glum themselves. It’s just horrible. That’s why I try to be quiet most of the time, out of the fear I’ll somehow infect everyone around me.”

             I am breathing heavily, patches of dead grass lie all around me. I look at Lily and notice hers lips are almost trembling. “Lily, I… now look what I’ve gone and done. I’m sorry, I-”

            She stops me mid-sentence with hasty words, lips quavering violently. “You’re too sweet for all this. This pain, this like deep sadness about everything. You’re too sweet for it.” She pauses trying to catch her breath. She glances up, staring at my eyes in her penetrating way. “That’s why I’m trying to help, all this sorrow, this grief tacked onto such a sweet boy. I’m usually a very selfish person you know.” We both laugh for a moment.

            “Well, I don’t mind adding to your karma points.”

            “No, no that’s not it. You don’t deserve this. I’m just trying to take away this heaviness, the _weight._ I don’t know how you’ve stood it in life with all these sad feelings floating in your head. It makes me feel so… petty.”

            “You’re one of the more profound people I know.” I say very earnestly.

            “Shut up. I’m just like, this brat.”

            “No, you’re not. Perhaps with your friends—I don’t think Silas and bring out the best qualities in people--but not here, not with me. You couldn’t be further from it, helping me like this.”

             She shakes her head. “You’re just too sweet for it all.”

                                                                                             ________________

            Lily smiled at me and walked next to me through the field to the ringing corridors. I became very aware of how tender and small she was. She kissed my cheek as we parted ways in the hallway and said “Let’s meet at the tree tomorrow. Ok?”

            I nodded. She walked away and I floated to class in a sluggish way. Everything in my mind and my eyes still seemed half-blurry. My foot wasn’t shaking though as I sat down and Remus smiled at me very large. He didn’t bring me any more water. Sirius and Peter joked about something; we all smiled and feigned diligence at whatever task the teacher had set us to. Tea leaves, perhaps.

            They again mocked me for my ‘masturbatory thickness’ and called me madmanrum for the rest of the day (though it was Sirius who had brought along the alcohol). I saw Lily later in the day. She smiled at me gently, her lips slightly quivering again, scratching her legs as she waved a covert hello. She lifted up the quill I had lent her some weeks ago, smiling and pointing at it. She mouthed ‘do you want this back?’

            ‘no’ I mouthed back. ‘keep it’

            ‘thanks sweetheart’ she said before turning back to her friends, her work, whatever.

            I felt different but the same. The days had shifted in certain ways, tears no longer found their ways to my showers, intermingled with the water streaming down onto me. Still, I was quieter than before. I sometimes frowned right after I smiled and felt a dense, uncomfortable weight in my stomach. I wondered what Lily was writing in her night blue notepad. I felt anxious about things though I wasn’t sure why.

            They were lighter though. I laughed two or three times throughout the day. I slept in a sound, post-drunken sort of way. I didn’t draw anything that night or plump my pillows over and over. The memories formed with instant nostalgia and collected in my mind--the strange stumbling spree with Sirius, the crumbled pages that I sifted into fresh turned dirt, Lily’s words, her trembling lips saying that I was too sweet for it all. I wasn’t sure if I believed her.  

                                                                                              ________________

            In a way I thought to be a healthy alternative to my obsessive dreaming of inconsequential details I began to form qualities and adjectives of this new Lily, the old Lily, one that existed in some semblance of reality. I had these images of her in my mind, torn nail polish that spoke of raunchy sexual affairs, drooping eyelids that hinted at drug use and a lack of sleep. I saw her in as this sexual, abstract thing that pursed her lips and crawled onto couches and spoke in whispers somehow for my benefit.

            Instead of these images--raw and intoxicating but still wildly inaccurate--I began to see her, shape her as this person. This person who spoke and trembled and held fears, dislikes, favors and worries. She was not at all like I dreamt her to be. She was this sweet girl, mesmerizing in her flightiness. She could be too honest in a wonderful way and she had empathy for those in pain, those suffering and it would take me a long time to understand why.

            She liked plain spring dresses and preferred trees with leaves and battered bark to red brick with mixed moldings and a uniform pattern. She kissed my cheek. She found me sweet. She wanted to save me from myself, my pains, the blueness of my recent months. She didn’t mind if I smoked but asked me not to. She preferred I wear navy blue over other colors. She scribbled quickly and I had no idea what she wrote.

            She was not this thing, this painting I drank and watched. She wasn’t simply a smattering of meals and limbs and bulging eyes. I had dehumanized her in my obsession. I made her a thing: something of images as opposed to words, a past and present but hardly a future. I would have never imaged she had regrets or preferences in literature. I would never think she was so human as to be kind, so real as to be on the verge of tears. I had never imagined her having _cares_ whatsoever, or _reasons_ for things.

            It was all so strange to me, so sad that I had missed the most important part of her, not eyelashes or speech patterns but her soul, the core golden thing that radiated inside her. That was what truly drew me to her. I had lived shallowly in my thoughts of her, perhaps purposefully. I feared that her looks and past boyfriends were not the things that _made_ me watch her, not the sleepy moss-colored eyes or bared limbs and tiny skirts but some golden glittering thing inside her that pulled me to her.

            Her smile was not a smile but an extension of something inside her. Her lips spoke not only of color and flesh and maybe past kisses, but the words I would someday hear emerge from them. Her eyes, those big weeping things, told me in ways her legs and freckles could not that someone resided below them, that someone kind and profound and easy going was there beneath those sink pools of green. Her legs showed a certain nonchalant nature, her eyebrows the thick sex appeal oozing like goo, her hips the absolutely mesmerizing femininity of her soul.

            I was blind. I really was a madman. I’d spent all this time focusing on her images and parts, the tiny clips of words and actions I could catch of her as I unknowingly, treacherously missed the big picture. It was out of fear. The idea that someone may be your soul mate for reasons other than bad behavior and bewitching mystery of existence, the idea that I loved a real thing, a real girl, a person that lived beneath eyes and lips and burnt colored hair was absolutely daunting. How terrifying to imagine that I felt _real_ things for a _real_ person who was made up of more than cells and colored lips and freckled pale skin. No wonder I was scared to admit that it was not an angelic doll I had fallen for but rather the shining, existent soul beneath it.

                                                                                             _________________

            How alarming to think I loved a _girl_ who had feelings and could think and cry and fear and forget. How great the pressure that I could disappoint her now that I had the chance to. I was blown away by the thought that someday I could make her cry. _I,_ this figure who used to stand from a distant and watch her slink and move and smile, now had true impact on her. I could say things to her that would alter how she feels, I could be honest or I could lie, I could insult her unknowingly, change her relationships with her friends. I suddenly had a choice in the matter and it scared me.

            I was in love with a girl. A real flesh and blood girl with a name and a history (one I could not concoct or alter with my thoughts), a girl whose lips quivered, who called me sweetheart beneath the trees. I was overwhelmed by this thought that I now held responsibility in the matter. It was no longer a row of coincidences, happenstance and viewing from afar. It could unfold into something other than distant, unrequited love.

            Everything had suddenly shifted from thoughts and wispy dreams to matter, molecules and vacuoles and genes all stuck together into something solid. It was as if a whole new girl had fallen from the sky. I admitted that her soul was what I wanted, not just the flimsy hanging flesh of her body. I wanted to talk to her and make her smile. I wanted to let her help me and slowly assign adjective after adjective to her aptly. I would have to risk things, put myself out there in front of her to take away or to trash. She, my savior, my poison and my anecdote would whisper to me and listen to me and smile at me and be there, near in my presence for day after day. She would unfurl herself, blooming like a flower, from an image and a thought to a series of quirks and tastes and habits. I would get to knew her day by day, inch by inch, moment by moment. And likewise she would get to know me.

            Our relationship was no longer a thing of water, something hovering between heaven and earth. She was no longer an angel but a girl. I was not longer a watchmen but a participant. Her name was not a thing numbed in my mind, representing a million disorganized fantasies. Our relationship was palpable, tangible as a stone statue. Only now had I realized the immensity of the situation, of my infatuation, not as an unhealthy invented thing but a materialized and awfully genuine crush.

            Terrible things jumped to my mind like she could be my soul mate and I could fuck it up. I could kiss her badly and not be able to undo it. I could say words I didn’t mean. I was no longer deluded, addicted, washed away in a fantasy world. My balloon had unceremoniously popped and I found myself, for the first time in months, planted firmly on the ground.

            It was a whole new world I now had to reckon myself with. A world in which my thoughts didn’t skew things, my words weren’t changeable, and the girl I loved was nary an obsession, a doll I waited for from heaven but a person I could and would interact with, a girl I would truly have to get to know, someone floated down from the ground and walking the same earth I was. A girl whose thoughts and memories and inner soul I wanted to understand, a girl with a real life and a real form, a girl who was trying to save me.

            That was it; she was a girl, not a myth or a fantasy, not an image, a picture, a collection of thoughts. She had blood coursing though her veins and thoughts I couldn’t read and I fancied her in a painful way. She was no image, no thought, no angel. She was a girl, a real girl I would have to begin to know her all over again. That thought was the only piece of her I really had, everything else was images dissolving.


	10. Kiss the Ground

**_ Chapter Ten_ ** : Kiss the Ground

 

            All there was to do was change, in earnest and without looking back. The terror of my revelation was two-fold: exhilarating and absolutely unshakable. I was always thinking, day after day, hour upon hour of my life was wasted away in a dreamt sort of thought. I contemplated my future and the mounting mishaps, missteps, mistakes of my past. I exhausted myself thinking about the intricacies of my own personality as if it were a language that could be learned, translating every cryptic action into the rainbow array of reasons behind it. Upon reflection it seemed a horrific waste to spend so much time consumed in aimless thought, the last stretch of which rarely strayed from the depressing.

            But I understood now that the past few months held a purpose, mainly to bring me unflinchingly here to this thought, this person who could sit on his bed and finally, unabashedly _understand._ My circumlocution was a time-consuming and vaguely dyslexic thing—daydreaming of flesh and forms and inventing a fanciful girl from little more than dust were not absolutely off the mark but rather confused offshoots of my true intention. Yet without them I would be lost, I would be someone else.

            I would wander though quidditch day upon day.

            I would sink lower and lower into my depression like a swimmer adrift, the water growing cold and my energy weaning, not even a bar of driftwood in sight.

            I would mumble to my friends and they would laugh and I would laugh and moments later find myself locked in the bathroom, dry-heaving over the toilet, feeling like I’d be better off dead.  

            And now I felt something else, something whole. I understood.

 

                                                                                                                 __________________

 

            There would be days later in my life that I would feel nostalgia for my loveless youth. 1974, 1973, years when my days consisted of getting high and plundering through a stack of Beatles records, The Rolling Stones, eating and talking and living with a grand and youthful abandonment. As soon as Lily entered my life, first from a distance then breath upon breath, I tumbled silently from Olympus where I was warm and godly and golden to a place of utter and un-surrendering humanity. Not only that but the most tender and throbbing humanity there was: love.

            I had heard for years that youth fancy themselves indestructible, steel-limbed, metal-hearted beings. We could walk anywhere, do anything, think anything and somehow, in the bleating glow of our adolescence, be untouched by it. I used to scoff at this aphorism like an over-played record, something so worn and cliché it had long since lost its truth. Year later I recognized in the clarity of my after-sight that it was true.

            Before everything, before Lily Evans and being sixteen, before this prophetic revelation, I was unafraid, sublime and assured and ignorantly blissful. Consequences were a far-flung thought. They were saggy, horrid things that remained dormant until one hits their forties or fifties, springing up like crabgrass in the form of monthly bills and yearly taxes. Like an inevitable prophecy one ultimately grew a gut and lost their hair, found themselves in a dull job with bad pay, finally paying the price of their youthful indescretions.

            I was aware that one day I’d meet my fate but at sixteen I was a world away. I had the elegant musk of the quidditch pitch and the deft sound of my best mates’ laughter. I had the heat of decadent, steaming dinners and the books I read languidly on my bed in the faint afternoon light. I had the docile Remus, patient and understanding. Always below his bed dusting and examining his rocks, lost for hours in their grooves and unsightly nicks. I returned from walks to hand him a palm full of smooth gray stones. His elastic smile “Thanks James!”

            It was a different Sirius then, the version of him before the black crept up, long before he was skin and bones and eating garbage in a cave lost in hills. I remember the flicker in his eye as he subtly suggested a prank. _Now men, say we take these balloons, yes, these colored strips of glorious plastic right here and fill them to the brim with say water, or pond scum. We shall then proceed to find an upper level window, one with little visual access and a dense hallway below it…_ I remember him reading passages of Vonnegut out loud, never sounding ridiculous, the words comfortable in his mouth and his eyes scanning the pages, lips erupting with sentences faster than I could think.

            I remember Peter back when he was innocent, slow in class, his milky blue eyes. I remember how he would eat cake on his bed uninterrupted by a scuffle or an argument, numb to his name as he devoured his precious sweets. I remember how loyal he was, how he laughed around us, cursed around us. Then, as he returned home he snapped into place like a rubber band, always going back no matter how far he stretched. I worried for him, as I did for all my friends in their own way. His tense parents, their worried eyes, yelling at him for eating too fast, talking too slow. They watched him like a criminal when he was only a kid. It was that tightness that ultimately sent him spinning out of control. We tried our best to lessen it but already lost in the terror of sin he seemed irretrievable.

            Alas, I digress. I simply remember the blind and effortless part of my life with affection because unlike others, whose trip from adolescence to adulthood came about with the birth of goop-covered children or vows read aloud in white church with a white dress, my trip ended at seventeen years old on that very night that I realized that I had earnestly fallen in love.

            My soul mate had drifted from an obscure floating shadow in my life to flesh, to words and quirks sweating beneath the sunlight and scribbling away. Perhaps it began with setting my notebook aflame (and thus my host of glittering plastic fantasies). Perhaps it began with the thought that I cannot be miserable for the rest of my life, hiding safely behind the truth, too sad and tired to live. I couldn’t continue just walking and waking and mumbling without effort, plagued by this horrible feeling that my life was already ruined, that I’d never have her, never be happy, never be myself again.           

            For a long time I felt this miserable feeling like a weight crushing my limbs, a constant acidic sickness in my stomach that never lessened or dissipated, the feeling of tremulous confusion.  

 

                                                                                                                __________________

 

            The sky had settled into a plum/flamingo/amber swirl. I watched the skyline from my window, an exotic sorbet of colors making love to each other, confusing and beautiful. Summer simply refused to slump into night until she was good and ready, dipping into the bruised blueblack of nighttime at seven or eight, sometimes nine.

            All in an instant I begun to think of myself with a sort of fond detachment. I regarded this person, this boy of days, months, maybe hours ago as someone alien and lost. At first this worried me, and then, as I gazed out on the summer sunset, neon and engulfed in soft fluorescent light, I thought of sailors lost in the sea--their hopeless eyes scanning the water, the tundra of ocean stretching further and further across the earth. Then, all of a sudden they would spot land, a sliver of brown amidst all the ghastly, hellish blue. In the chaos of yips and screams, hugging each other, tears streaming down their faces they would land in some obscure town and kiss the ground over and over, _thank you god, thank god we made it._

            The last flecks of gold were peeling off the sky and dripping away, only to return full force in the morning. I silently found my last pack of emergency cigarettes (stuffed beneath my mattress with a menagerie of lighters, a few crumpled pounds, the unsavory notes we passed to each other in our more droning classes and a half-empty bottle of men’s cologne that I smelled only faintly as my head touched my pillow each night). I walked into the bathroom, stood over the toilet and let the cigarettes drop from the carton one by one like raindrops. I watched them, damp and floating in toilet water, and pulled the handle. I stayed as they swirled around and around, drowning into the sewage pipes and thus oblivion. I thought of how they would travel through a mucky series of pipes, swept through a maze of filth until they found their way to a landfill or a septic tank or some other dirty, lost place in the universe.

            I walked over to my bed and slowly pulled the sheets off. They looked like glinting satin fish scales. I changed my pillow case. I removed a hoard of mislaid socks which had found their way to the foot of my bed, dirty and partner-less, abandoned for months. I replaced the sheets one by one (noting the similarities between making one’s bed and a fine baklava). I smoothed each level, running my hands along the ripples until they disappeared in a single smooth surface. I fluffed my pillow into a marshmallow-like glob. I cleared the mess surrounding my bed, flotsam of unopened books and marked up papers (swathed in surreal doodles and unfinished sketches). I even ventured in the dank cave under my bed where the dust bunnies dwelled like goblins.

            Breathing in steady, concentrated breaths I transformed my bed from a lump of twisted sheets and deflated pillows to something smooth and inviting. Instead of something evocative of a tornado aftermath it was now a place to sit, to sleep, to admire from afar. Remus would be so proud to see that my quarter of the room now closely resembled his spotless sanctuary (now giving him the advantage of a full half of the room, clout which he would certainly use to sway Remus and Peter to follow in our pristine footsteps).

            With my bed cleaned, my cigarettes tossed and the sultry sky faded reluctantly to Lily’s favorite navy blue I pondered what to do next. In a jolt of divine intervention I decided that due to the lack of alternatives I would do my homework. This year, and mainly my inability to deal with it, left my schoolwork neglected if not wholly forgotten. The teachers knew me as a once dedicated student and pitied me, for unknown but clearly present reasons. I had failed nothing but rather scraped along depressingly.

            In defiance of myself, my past, everything I’d been just hours ago I pulled out three battered textbooks. I sat on my clean bed and spread them out before me. I got a roll of parchment, a white quill with its black ink and I worked.

            Some unintended consequences of my scholastic hiatus popped up as I toiled away. For instance, my handwriting had suddenly reverted to that of a small child. My focus was shot, flitting in and out of what I was reading and having to go back and re-read paragraphs and pages two to three times. I read and I wrote and I worked so slowly that assignments which were once a bothersome breeze now took twice as much time and effort. I felt like a dim child doing his older brother’s homework but with each sentence thoughts flooded back to me, a mellifluous flow of spells and charms and ingredients, how to write a paper, how to cite the antiquated ancient runes textbook with its medieval wording and archaic script.

            I pushed on in the hope that I could make my way through this mountain of work, dozens of spells to master and papers to write, accompanied by sincere but vague notes of apology explaining I’d had a slight mental breakdown—but honestly, no need to worry!—and will promptly begin to make up every last thing I owe.

 

                                                                                                                __________________

 

            Peter walked in. He saw me perched on my clean bed surrounded by papers and opened books and stopped dead in his tracks. “What the…”

            I paid him no attention. I was deep into page four of my essay for Ms. Kirkam, scribbling ferociously, eyes zipping between the text and my parchment.

            “What the fuck are you doing.”

            _Scribble scribble._ I saw him out of the corner of my eye, staring at me like an elephant dressed in drag. His big eyes protruded in dismay, his body stuck in that one position, gaping and confounded.

            “James, my dear friend, what _on god’s green earth_ are you doing?”

            I paused and looked up at him “My homework.”

            “What?” This answer puzzled him as much as my silence.

            “I am doing my homework.”

            “You never do your homework.” He looks apprehensive, face furrowed, lips taut.

            “Yes, well…”

            “You look possessed.” His left eye has closed and his head is cocked to one side, the way dogs appear when they are overwhelmed.

            “I am not possessed.”

            “I don’t really understand.”

            “I just have a lot of work to do so maybe you could kindly be baffled in silence.”

            “Since when did you start doing your homework James? I’m… I’m just flabbergasted. Sirius is going to get a fucking kick out of this.”

            “Considering he gets a kick out of that high timbre of the house elves voices, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

            “Seriously?”

            “Seriously what.”

            “ _Seriously,_ you are doing your _homework?”_ He is shaking his head.

            “What do you think I’m doing?”

            “You look deranged.”

            “I’m doing my homework.”   

            He wandered to his bed, glancing at me every few minutes to see if I was indeed doing work and not plotting some elaborate murder scheme or mapping an escape route to Azkaban. His confusion, while slightly depressing, had a humorous tint. I had not done my work for so long that I now appeared truly incapable of it.

 

                                                                                                               ________________           

 

             Remus arrived with Sirius in tow. They both had drowsy, beaten expressions and carried two large white bags with “C” written in the center. They walked in without a look my way. By this point I was onto a series of integral charms I had to memorize and perfect as soon as humanly possible (what with exams coming and a whole host of negligence to work against). Peter pointed my way, his eyes growing wide again. They both swiveled to face me.

            After a few moments Remus said “James, are you doing, is that… your homework?”

            “Mhmm.” By this point I was grateful for a brief respite. I beamed up at them with a wholesome grin. Homework was wholesome, I was wholesome.

            “Oh. Did you… did you make your bed?” He asked tentatively.

            “Yes, and I also quit smoking.”

            “Goodness James, my congratulations!” He rushed over and hugged me. “I’m very pleased you cleaned.” He surveyed the spotlessness, even checking under my bed where he knew I once feared to venture (as an eleven year old I had some unrealistic fears concerning things living below it). “Very thorough.”

            Sirius sat down next to me, his face expanded into a wide joker grin. “Hey James, _mate._ ” He put his arm around my shoulders.

            “Hello Sirius.”

            “You’re possessed again, aren’t you?”

            I laughed. “What is with this on-going possession joke?”

            “It’s in the eyes.” Pointing at his eyes and then mine with his fingers like a bent peace sign.

            “What spurred this wonderful change of heart?” Remus yelled from across the room.

            “Yes, James, what spurred this change of heart?” Sirius said in a low voice.

            “Oh, nothing, summer. You know.”

            “We don’t know. We never know.” Peter yelled and then promptly turned to Remus and muttered “He’s mad, I know it. He’s gone completely bonkers and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

            Sirius unearthed something from the big white bag “Croissant?”

            “Oh, why yes.” I said.

            “Remus and I made a little trip to the kitchens.” He smiled.

            “Which might have gone smoothly if you didn’t insist on making the House Elves say ‘chick-a-dee’”. He shook his head. “What a strange request.” Remus said whilst removing his own flaky blond croissant.

            “I can’t get enough of it.” Sirius laughed. He moved to his own bed, lay down and placed three croissants on his stomach.

            “You’re going to get crumbs all over your bed, just to let you know in our new tradition of cleanliness. And also, do you really need _three?_ ”

            “Look what you’ve done James.” Sirius bit into the croissant, spilling little doughy flakes everywhere, laughing as Remus watched on with disgust.

            We ate quietly. Sirius closed his eyes and proceeded to blindly make his way though all three pastries. “You know James, you are terribly perplexing.” He sat up with golden flakes dropping all around him.

            “He’s a fucking walking puzzle.” Peter injected, not angry but rather ruffled. “I absolutely don’t get it. First he’s diligent, does his work, quidditch, all that. Then, he can’t do work for the life of him and _now_ I walk in and he’s all bent over his books like Snivellus Snape.”

            “I’m surprised more girls don’t like you. They love a puzzle, quixotic and challenging and all that.” Remus mused.

            “Oh plenty of girls want to shag him silly.” Sirius said. “ _Evapatorious.”_ He flicked his wand and all the flakes vanished. “Quidditch God, too romantic for his own good, loyal, mystifying. James is hot property. “

            “Oh shut it Sirius.” I said.

            “Tis true. Only no one is quite up to his standards, eh. She’d have to be gorgeous, profound, and willing to crack to code. I doubt there’s a girl at Hogwarts up to the challenge.”

            “Now that you mention it, I heard Ella Ellisby, that tiny little brunette with the coke problem, chatting to her girlfriend about how ‘fit’ you are.” Remus said.

            Sirius looked at me “My point exactly.”

            The thought of Ella Ellisby made me feel nauseous. She was attractive in a sort of lewd way with her sharp brown eyes and pointed eyebrows, hair down to her hips. She talked to me sometime in class, whining about some assignment or talking up a party she went to last night where so and so snogged so and so and she did some copious amount of cocaine. The thought of me with other girls was rude and inappropriate and it made me uncomfortable. None of them would be Lily, none of them could or would matter to me and this conversation was making me increasingly squirmish.

            “Let’s see, who could James date? Who has the credentials we are looking for?”

            “No, no let’s really not do this. Ok. I’m fine, I have my homework. I have a lot of homework.”

            “Homework won’t keep you warm.”

            “My blankets will keep me warm.” I gathered my papers around me and once again immersed myself in my work. “We’ll talk about this another time, or never, really it’s not a problem.”

 

                                                                                                                _________________         

 

            I woke up early to attend breakfast with Remus and Peter (Sirius always opted for more sleep, with the requisite loss of points and comically indignant teachers). Cherub morning light swallowed the room, a blush as pure as honey. I couldn’t help but smile. My alarm set off into its hysterical call of _bzzzzzzztDINGs_ , a panicked humming I hadn’t heard since winter.

            We walked to the Great Hall in attire one step above bedclothes, spongy shirts with holes in them and too-thin pants made of plaid or cotton. Our eyes wilted in lingering sleepiness, a lull that wouldn’t elapse until first period was fully underway. I ate breakfast like a human (or rather an adolescent boy), doling out gobs of scrambled eggs and making a mountain of French toast with syrup slipping all over it like an amber waterfall, crimped bacon strips were scattered beside it emitting an aroma that made me weak.

            I plowed through the food, feeling the separate tastes on my tongue. There was the savory crunch of bacon drenched in syrup, the eggs like clouds, French toast with a hint of cinnamon brushing against my tongue, saturated and exquisitely satisfying. It was only after a few minutes that I noticed Peter and Remus watching me once again without movement. They looked dismayed and even fearful, as if I was some ravenous alien that had inhabited their friend and threatened to burst forth at any moment in fireworks of green and goop. Even a few people around us watched in amused silence. I was like wildlife, somehow striking and watchable by completing my normal functions.           

            Again, the blend of humor and sadness in it struck me. My accomplishment of basic tasks (eating being necessary to _life_ ) came as a shock. I seemed to be surprising on a daily basis. First it was my descent from normalcy: the chain-smoking, the skipped meals, my disappearance for hours at a time. This followed by my sallow skin, my rare attendance of class, my inability to work or talk or think, and then the awful smell (which was gone by now with a few hot showers and a nightly gargle). Now, I was surprising people with my swift return, eating and doing homework, cracking jokes, slowly putting back on the weight I’d lost.

            After acclimating themselves to the thought that yes, I was eating, and no this was not a sign of possession or an alien inhabitance, they stacked their own plates in similar confections and shrugged it off. Our eyes slowly widened as the sun grew stout, overflowing into the room until it was nothing but light.

            “The day is shaping up to be a luscious one.” Peter remarked with glee. “God, I love the summer.”

            “We should make this a tradition.” Remus said. He understood my suffering in a way others could not and he seemed genuinely pleased as I made my way back to sanity.

            “I’d like that.” I said. My plate was now empty but for a few syrup spills and deserted flecks of bacon, tiny gobs of drowning toast.

            Remus continued thoughtfully “We should really try to get Sirius up with us. If he wasn’t so charming Gryffindor might truly despise him. All those points gone to waste. Anyway, it might be a nice activity for the four us, what with school winding down and all.”

            “He doesn’t sleep, that’s why.” Peter said matter-of-factly, continuing to shovel food into mouth “He doesn’t get to bed until two or three so he has a hell of a time getting up in the morning. You two are a quite the pair of insomniacs.” He motioned to me.

            “I think if we asked him nicely he would make an effort.” Remus said.

            “I think if we bribed him with a paradise of food he’d made the effort.” I said. I imagined his child-like eyes as he walked into the great hall, like entering Willy Wonka’s factory in a blaze of piled plates and picturesque food, just as intoxicating as edible grass and chocolate lakes.

 

                                                                                                               _________________       

 

            A few minutes passed discussing how to get Sirius up before ten AM and a wistful talk about the glories of Rhoal Dahl on our childhood imaginations. “You know what I’ve been think about?”

            “What?”

            “Do you remember when we were younger--what thirteen or fourteen?—and we would all lie around Sirius’s bed and he would read out loud. We would just sit there for hours listening to him. Just close our eyes and listen.”

            “God, I haven’t thought about that for years.” Peter said.

            “We would just lie there lethargically in our room, untouched by anything. For _hours._ ” I thought of Sirius’s hair back when it hung above his ears, a chubby-cheeked Peter before his growth spurt. “He would just go on like that, never slowing down or fumbling, just his steady voice and the whisper of the pages turning.” 

            Remus smiled. “By the end of it our eyes would be closed like we were in some sort of trace.”

            Peter pushed his plate away, a dizzy fullness on his face, all three of us remembering. “When he was reading Cat’s Cradle we would all just rush back to our room after class. Without a word he would get out the book and we’d settle on the floor and he’d just start to read. He didn’t take a breath until nighttime.”

            We reveled in our memories. The thought of Sirius reading stemmed into our own private memories, ones of unfortunate haircuts and crushes of the week. We recalled whole days, lost in the past, when we were younger. Our first foray into cursing (which naturally we all took too far, squeezing four letter words into every sentence we could), Sirius’s first kiss when he was twelve. He walked back to the room, a certain war-like glint in his eyes as he explained everything in excruciating detail. We listened rapt, when would it be our turn?

            There was our first childish taunting of Severus Snape and the time I got detention for sneaking into the girl’s bathroom (I just wanted a glimpse). There was the unfortunate day Peter lit his own arm on fire in a simple charm gone wrong, panic mixed with giggles in the classroom--the girl’s running to the corner with screeches, the boys laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe. Finally Sirius grabbed a bucket of water used to wash the blackboard and doused the fire.  Peter wore a cast for weeks.

            Nowadays we sometimes stumbled upon memories of our first time smoking pot, the first time we got drunk in Hogsmeade or a few uninspiring girls that inhabited our recent past. But these were lost memories, like a forgotten ark they had sunk to the ocean floor. Not only did we neglect to think of them, the days of our early pubescence, but we almost forgot their existence as a whole. Now, floating to the surface they created a web of thoughts like an elaborate timeline. This memory linked to that one, emerging at the most random of days.

 

                                                                                                                 __________________

 

            It’s strange to think that whole weeks and months could slip away from you. You could forget that you were ever nine and dissolve the pain of a childhood catastrophe (you spill juice in your lap and look like you’ve peed your pants, you are picked last for a game, the thought of it haunts you for weeks on end) by simply losing the day all together. Details flushed back like the taste of our favorite bubblegum, the exhilaration of slipping each other bogie flavored Bertie Bots, our first clumsy rides on a broom only feet above the ground.

            I could have cried for the world it opened up. Just thinking it (Sirius reading, the serene look on his face, our comfortable half-sleep as he spoke) wasn’t enough but the moment I said it out loud the thoughts came back to me, not one by one but in streams, a hundred days all at once. Whole portions of my life returned to me when I was young and impressionable--parting my hair to the side becuase it made my mother happy, being frail and short, the bug eyes of childhood followed shortly by cracking voices and stretching limbs. I was inundated with thoughts of a time before Lily, before I’d even tasted a cigarette, before I knew what sadness was and alternately what elation could be. It was a time of awkward uncertainty when small things consisted the world, thoughts rarely straying further than meals, pranks, getting good marks.

            It pleased me to remember myself then, an increasingly gangly boy who was always smiling, always winking at the pretty girls in hopes that I was somehow suave. I remembered my reckless swoops in quidditch games, that feeling of rushing through the air, my heart pounding, the dewy scent of grass, the delight of bursting through clouds and scoring goals. To think of the silly, thoughtless, laughing stretch of my youth before I ever contemplated love or death, before I recognized in full how truly confused I was, made me hopeful because here I was coming full circle with my own past lives piling up in front of me, happy snapshots in a row reminding me of who I once was.

            These were years buried so deep in the past I forgot I even had them but here they were, mine forever with their vivid colors. Then, it was the pulsing of my stomach in childlike anticipation, the deepening lilt of my voice as hairs sprouted across my body and my legs extruded like things made from clay. Now, my nightmares were far from the monsters under my bed or worry that a prank might go awry. My fears were contained to losing my soulmate like trees lost in a brushfire. 

            I was constantly changing, we all were, shifting bit by bit and then all of a sudden waking up as someone new entirely. Not only my looks but the contents of my brain which shifted radically from candy and Christmas night to passing my OWLs and remaining sane in the chaos of such a complicated world (complicated by my thoughts, by Lily and my clenching need for her, by summer slowly falling away and yes the world, the whole world and all it has and how it had expanded so). I was once different and in a matter of weeks I would change again, another james slipping into the cosmos. But I still had those thoughts, precious perfect memories of a time before like butterflies, bright and fleeting, so wonderful they took my breath away.

             Who I was now was different, though not entirely unrelated to who I was then.  Things that happened when I was fourteen are the very reason for who I was at sixteen, seventeen, a foreshadow of the person I’d be at nineteen and twenty six. Cells consistently turning themselves over, rapidly replacing each other. Always in the limbo of change, never quite solid enough to grip the railing and stay forever but never loose enough to float away. Yet I was still myself, a conglomeration of past versions with a few things in common, most things changed.

            I was myself but also a multi-fold silhouette of old selves, which I would be forever, no matter what. The good and the bad of every day I’d every lived was instilled inside me affecting every aspect of my life, the glorious curse of a past that never melts. Always I would have my childhood and then my youth, always I would have those memories, those old selves grinning inside me, lost in my brain but always there, always mine, the one thing in my life that would never change.

 

                                                                                                                __________________       

    

            We galloped into class, joyfully reminiscing at lightning speed about the moments we hadn’t mentioned since we were in them. This prank and that placid youthful scandal, the time Remus asked us what ‘foreplay’ was (“is that a game?”), Peter’s flirt with a rat tail (we finally shaved it off in the middle of the night, calmly explaining the next morning that it was for his own good), how Sirius’s younger brother used to make unexplained daily trips to our room to moon us.

            Surprisingly Sirius had made it on time. Pouches of dark skin hung under his eyes and he had the wrong notebook. “Oh, hello.” He says in a dazed voice, still asleep in his head.

            “Bravo on making it to class.” Peter said.

            “Ah, well, if James can do it I suppose so can I.”

            “Glad to see I’m the image of dysfunction.” I said.

            “Yes well, you are ein rätsel [a puzzle], just left of dysfunction.”

            “Nice to hear your German is well and kicking.” Always a surprise when it bubbles up.

            “An elephant never forgets.” Woozily he points to his head.

            Peter mouths “ _an elephant?”_

            “So what are you lot all riled up about?” He pressed his palms into his eyes, trying very diligently to be alert and admit to himself he is not still asleep in his bed.

            “We were reminiscing.” Remus says turning Sirius’s upside down notebook right side up and handing him a quill.

            “Aren’t we a bit young to be reminiscing? Isn’t that an activity for the elderly and those who have peaked too soon?”

            “Do you remember reading Cat’s Cradle?” I said. His eye burst open, sleep washed away in an instant.

            He began to laugh. “Oh, my, _god_. I haven’t thought about that for… years. I would lie in my bed and read books to you lazy bums. Doing all the voices and such.”

            “Thus, the reminiscing.” Peter said smiling.

            “Wow.” With that it was clear he had launched into his own galaxy of memories.       

 

                                                                                                               __________________           

 

            Before class started I jumped up and walked towards Mr. Marguiles. He was a stoic man in his sixties or perhaps early seventies with bushy black eyebrows (mixed in with gray). His skin resembled rawhide, leathery and too tan, and his squinted gray eyes never revealed any thought or emotion, rather like tiny crystal balls always flooded with mist.

            “Hello Mr. Marguiles.” I said, hoping to sound respectful and not jog bad memories of lateness and talking through his lectures.

            He glanced down at an attendance sheet. “Mr. Potter is it?”

            “Yes Sir.”

            “I see you are attending my class today.” His eyes glaring down at me, little storms.

            “Well, er, yes I am and I intend to continue, to be here, for the rest of the year Sir.”

            “The year is almost over.” He is silent for a moment. “Are you aware how much work you are missing?”

            “Yes Sir, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I, er, I’ve… um… I’ve been having some personal troubles as of late but I have three of the six assignments I owe you.” I paused, rifling through papers to find those with an ‘M’ at the top. “Right here, here you go.”

            He paged through them. “They do say better late than never. Though I prefer on time. These will be marked down two letter grades. And when will I be getting the rest of the work?”

            “As soon as possible Sir, hopefully this week or next week. I do have some other classes to catch up in as well…”

            “Alright Mr. Potter, I’ll hope to see you soon.” I turned around to see that the whole class had been watching.

 

                                                                                                                ________________

 

            In the next period and the period after I handed back papers, my stack dwindling from hearty to slim. I arranged make-up times for exams and apologized for my bad behavior, missing work, ridiculous attendance record and those trouble-making boys I hung around with. Ms. Kirkam called me a dear and encouraged me to ‘keep track of myself’ and ‘breathe deeply’. Mr. Heely laughed in his heavy, booming way. He assured that as always there was _no need to worry boy, hand me the work and that is that._

            Sirius had committed certain passages of books to memory. Jogged by our reminiscing of his short career as a Novel Reader Extraordinaire he began reciting passages in the lull of class. We clamored to guess the source, keeping track in his notebook.

            Peter: 3

            Remus: 8

            James: 6

            In the sordid heat of summer our brains were blank. Every student in every class had their mind somewhere else (but for a determined few). Classmates were slumped around the room, heads on their desks, eyes fluttering shut. Some girls giggled on one end of the room, the boy next to me was literally asleep with a small puddle of drool clouding around his mouth.

            The teachers pressed on as they always did, regaling us with quirky facts that still failed to catch our interest, planning unique activities, smiling more than usual. Sadly, it was a lost cause in the humid heat and blistering sun. We were warm and distracted and our minds could not help but float. They wandered to book quotes and summer flings, swooping away to a beach house in the south of France, a childhood best friend who waited for them at home. Dazed and slouching students doodled or talked quietly, discussing who had become suddenly attractive over the passing months, who had porked up. Most just daydreamed of the days to come--parties, butterbeers, kisses, sleeping past noon. As the bell sounded for lunch there as an unmistakable sigh of relief on the part of teachers and students alike. We filed out dreamily, heading into the sunshine from every direction.

 

                                                                                                               _________________          

 

            I walked towards the tree with my hands in my pockets. I felt calmer today. It was humid and the grass was fluorescent, a green that lit up for what seemed like miles. Small clusters of flowers dotted the ground, dry and yellow, wilted dandelions and parched purple blossoms.

            “Hi.” She says, shielding the sun with her hands.

            “Mmm, hi.” She plops onto the ground. I remain standing, surveying the green grass flowing out into the skyline.

            She tugs on my hand, fingers lacing into mine for a split second. “Sit down.”

            “You see the grass? It’s like being in the middle of an ocean, except its grass and it’s green and you can’t drown in it. But look, it’s everywhere.”

            She laughs “Waxing poetic on manicured lawns?”

            “It’s just, I don’t remember it being everywhere. You’d have to walk miles to hit a dirt road.”

            “They like us secluded I suppose.” She says, laying back.

            “I never thought of it that way, us being in this grand castle miles from civilization like this. They’re hiding us, aren’t they?”

            “Nothing like a bunch of freaks in black robes to scare the locals.” Her eyes were shut, arms loose like spaghetti.

            “Ah, with wands and broomsticks too.” The fact that I represented someone else’s nightmare was almost laughable, yet still distressing. I like cats, I read poetry, I have an affinity for pancakes. Was I really all that scary? Apparently, despite all this, I was.

            “When my mother found out I was a witch she cried and cried like it was kingdom come. She asked me if I wanted an exorcism. I told her priests scare me.”

            “I can only imagine. Muggles must have a time with it.”

            “My father thought I was kidding. He played along with it for a few days, saying things like ‘off to the witch farm!’ and joking that my room should be spotless, what with my _magical powers_ and all.” She laughed. “Then, this one night I couldn’t take it anymore and I lit his newspaper on fire and he left for three days. Came back stinking drunk with rips all over his shirt. He crashed our pickup truck.”

            I finally sat down, nestling into the grass. “My parents bought me a cake.”

 

                                                                                                               __________________      

   

            “I saw you this morning.” We lay on the ground with our eyes shut, close enough to almost touch. I could feel the hairs of grass tickling my arm, hear the sound of her breath inhaling and flowing out.

            “You did now?”

            “Mhmm. Eating breakfast in the Great Hall with those two boys, the pale one with the sandy hair and the droopy smile and the boy with the pretty eyes.” She laughed. “Your friends are cute.”

            “Yes well, I choose my friends solely on the basis of looks.”

            “So do I. Why else do you think I hang around you so much?” Shaking with laughter, the ground pulsing next me.

            Still with our eyes shut. “Are you calling me cute?”

            “I’m calling you handsome.” My stomach shook, this feeling, I understood why people called it butterflies.

            “I’m glad you think so. It means many a vigorous Quidditch practices have not gone to waste.”

            “Yes, and I’m glad you’ve start brushing her hair.” She laughed on.

            “I will admit, my grooming isn’t always on par but I try to make up for it by being well-read and polite.”

            Suddenly I recognized the sound of footsteps coming towards us. Before I could open my eyes I heard “Hey man, you need?” His smooth voice, always too cool, always stoned.

            I opened my eyes in time to see Lily snap up. “Amos?” Her face scrunched into disbelief.

            He turned to her, hadn’t even noticed her presence. “Lily?”

            “Hi.”

            “Oh, hey, you guys…?” He looked between us. “Oh shit man. Never would have guessed.”

            “You know him?” She said to me.

            “Yeah.” I nodded.

            “This is a relatively small school Lils.” His dirty grin.

            “Oh, yeah. I just, I didn’t know. That you guys, knew… each other.”

            “Yup. It’s a small world Evans.” He stood above us in dirty jeans, a cigarette tucked behind his ear.

            “Apprently so.” She placed her hand on my arm and bent into my ear “What are you getting from him?”

            “He needs stogies.” Amos said, leaning towards her, laughing.

            “Mmm.” Her eyes like slits.

            “So you need man, heavy schedule, decisions, decisions.”

            “No.”

            “No? Nah? My solid customer going A-wall?”

            “I, ahem, I’ve quit smoking.”

            “You don’t have to say that.” She mumbles.

            “Yeah, Lils don’t mind. She’s used to a lot more than a little ciggy smoke, ain’t that right?” She kicked him in the shin shockingly hard and he wobbled for a moment, clutching at the spot she struck.

            “Bye Amos.”

            He took the hint. “Yeah, bye Lils.” He turned to me “Hit me if you need.” As he walked away he yelled “Looking good Miss Evans!”

            “Looking scummy Dig!” She yelled back. He swiveled around, giving a big thumbs up and walked on.

            As he receded into the distance she turned to me. “You know him James?”

            “I really did quit. Yesterday. Flushed my last pack.”

            “Amos Diggory is the last black-souled human you need in your life.”

            “He’s not in my life.”

            “He just came up to you.”

            “Yeah, he bought me cigarettes. But I no longer smoke, as of yesterday officially, thus I no longer see him, thus there’s no need for that concerned look on your face.” My mind was now reeling about Amos and Lily, their publicized relationship. I scanned through all the rumors I’d heard about them, ranging from intimate to ridiculous, trying to discern which were harmless and which held truth. “Anyway.”

            She paused, her eyes flit around, scanning the tree. “Aren’t you proud?”

            “Of what?”                                                                                  

            “I’m early.”

 

                                                                                                                __________________           

 

            We sat against the tree in a plea for shade but all we managed was a dappled version of it. I pulled out a piece of chocolate, placed it on my tongue and felt it slowly dissolve. “Do you want a croissant?”

            “Do you _have_ a croissant?”                                                         

            “Why yes, as a matter of fact I do.” I pulled out a small tinfoil lump in the shape of a crescent. “For you.”

            “Midnight trip to France?”                                                          

            “Yes, I went a bit crazy with the floo powder.”

            She giggles “It happens.”

            She delicately peeled layers away, sighing as she ate. “Mmm, these are delicious.” She turned to me. “Do you want some?”

            “No, I’m ok.”

            “Have a little. I saw you eating this morning, so it’s safe to assume you're capable.”

            “I’m alright, really.”

            She peeled off a corner. “Just eat this, for me.”                          

            I laughed and shook my head. “Whatever you want.” She watched as I ate it, smiling brightly. “So, you and Amos?” I couldn’t contain myself any longer.

            She rolled her eyes. “Yes, me and Amos.”

            “How long did you two date?” I wanted to know but I was also scared of what she might reveal. What if she had loved him?

            “Couple of months. I was enamored. He was charming and vaguely badass and I was naïve and bored. He always had drinks.”

            I laughed. “Perfect qualifications for a relationship.”

            She scoffed “Yes well, I was a stupid fifteen year old.”

            “And now?”

            “And now I’m a slightly less stupid sixteen year old. Only slightly.”

            “If you don’t mind my asking, what was your relationship like?” It was curiosity that got the better of me. My rational mind wanted nothing to do with Amos Diggory and his connection to Lily, but my curiosity on the other hand was ravenous.

            “I don’t mind.” She pondered for a moment. “It was wild. He got me to do ridiculous things I would never do otherwise, getting smashed in empty classrooms at four in the morning, swimming in the lake with that terrifying squid in it. He always knew just what to say and it took me so long to realize that what he was saying was nothing more and nothing less than just what I wanted to hear.”                        

            Like all things I was surprised to hear her describe it in these terms, sort of maturely, honesty, always unabashed. I had always felt a kind of mild, inconsequential respect for Amos because he never asked questions, he never pried. Her description of him made perfect sense, limitless and smooth-talking. “You two spawned a whole network of gossip.”                                                                                  

            “I tend to do that. It’s rather unfortunate really. I sometimes wonder if Audrey and Silas might not be as tight-lipped as they appear.”

            “I wouldn’t say they appear tight-lipped at all really.”

            “Eh, Audge has kept a couple of my secrets at the very least. Silas on the other hand is a bit of a gossip. He thinks it’s too funny.”

            “So why did you and Amos, you know, end it?”                       

            “Let’s see, I barely remember now.” She thought for a moment. “Well, we broke up and we got together about a hundred times. He’d do something stupid or hit on some girl and I’d tell him to go fuck himself and he’d come back a couple days later saying he loved me and all this bullshit.” There were the stinging words. “I always took him back though. He seemed so sincere. He’d walk into my dorm and Audge would disappear and he would just sit on my bed and tell me he was _so_ sorry and _god_ he missed me and he was miserable and please, please don’t stay mad at him forever. And I never would.” She shrugged.

            “What did Audrey and Silas think of him?”                               

            “Silas and him were best mates for a while, quite the pair.”

            “I can imagine.” I mumbled.

            “Audrey, well, she always said he was ‘devastating sexy’ and used to joke that once we were through she’d ‘take a whirl’. Only by that point she was going through her strange bi-sexual phase when she refused to snog any boys for six months after some shmuck called her Delilah. But regarding her opinions, I’m afraid she’s more into how a boy kisses than the contents of his soul.” This made me laugh.

            “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

            “So the breakup, the _final_ breakup that is. Let’s see. Oh! You’re going to laugh when you hear this… He proposed to me.”

            “What!?”

            “Yeah, he came in tripping on something and he put this ring of tinfoil on my finger and he said that we were both hopeless souls and that probably no one would love us but each other and that we were meant for one another, mainly on the basis of matching sins, and he asked me to marry him. Bended knee and all.”

            “So, how is that a break up?”

            “Oh, well, I told him _I_ wasn’t hopeless and that he should find God.” Of all the rumors not a hint of this, not even a bizarre re-incarnation. Oh, the irony.                                            

            “You told him to find God?”

            “Yes, partly in sarcasm and partly in sincerity. The boy was lost and rotten, still is. Oh, I also kicked him. He cried like a baby. It was a whole big mess.”

            “Sounds like it.”

            “Anyway, that’s the tale. He was a jerk and I was ridiculous. Puppy love.” She sighed mockingly. “I’m kidding, it was a strange time for me. Amos filled my bad boy quota. The thought of it makes me a bit nauseous but oh well, it happened, I’ve moved on.”

            “I see why you like me to brush my hair.”

            “Of all the people to walk up to us Dig is the last person I’d expect. It really is a small, strange little world, isn’t it?”                                                                                                   

            “Seems to be.”

 

                                                                                                                __________________

 

            Bell rings, we walk back, _see you tomorrow,_ yeah, _today was weird,_ yeah it was, _bye james,_ bye lily.

            I return the rest of my completed papers. My quotation score jumps to thirteen, leaving Remus indignantly one point behind me at 12. Peter has lost his interest, remaining static at 6. At dinner I once again eat like a human, garnering only a few warm looks from a group of third year girls beside me. Supposedly people had begun to speculate that I had some sort of strange male eating disorder (which was no more shameful than the truth) and found it heartening that I was ‘getting better’.

            After dinner we all walked back to our room in a familiar silence, all thinking the same thought. Without having to say a word we sat down beneath Sirius’s bed and he pulled out a worn red copy of Cat’s Cradle.          

            _Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John._

_Jonah—John—if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still—not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something had compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail._

            The entrancing rhythm of his voice, the relaxing heat, our shoulders slumped, our eyes fluttered shut. We still laughed at the same things as when we were thirteen. What a strange world he'd created. Whose last name was Hoenikker? Americans writers seemed a strange and quirky race, a far cry from Dickens and Shakespeare. If it weren’t for Sirius’s and his offbeat taste we’d never have stumbled upon such a book. He read faithfully until the sun set in a new concoction of colors, now made of beehive gold and red as thick as rubies.

            It was like we were thirteen all over again, hairless and crude, listening to Sirius read like it was just another night. We went to bed early, all four of us, even Sirius who was drained from waking at a reasonable hour and spent from his day of recalling quotations. Today, for the first day, I didn’t think about the heavy things. I didn’t dwell in a cloud of smoke. I spent time with Lily and I did some assignments and I listened to my mate read an eccentric American book. I ate and I went to sleep and I didn’t think or drown and all I wanted was everything I had, my soul mate at arm’s length and my best friends snoring in their respective beds and sixteen years full of memories and former selves like separate people, always be there coaxing me on, reminding me of who I once was and alluding to who I would one day be. Dreaming and waking and summer, the sorbet of the sunset, teachers who were forgiving. It was all I could ever want or require and I knew with certainty that I was going to be just fine. 

 

                                                                                                                __________________

 

A/N: Anyone still reading? Hah. It seems that Ur.org has turned into a bit of a ghost town. Alas, I continue to write. Summer is slipping away, the annual august thrum of anticipation has set in. If you are still reading drop me a line, as always I welcome and adore all your comments/concrit/thoughts/tangents. olivia


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